review

PROVO, Utah — An attorney for the 22-year-old man charged with killing Charlie Kirk asked a judge Monday for more time to review the large amount of evidence in the case before deciding if the defense will seek a preliminary hearing.

A preliminary hearing would determine if there is enough evidence against Tyler Robinson to go forward with a trial. Defendants can waive that step, but Robinson’s newly appointed attorney Kathryn Nester said her team did not intend to do so.

Utah prosecutors have charged Robinson with aggravated murder and plan to seek the death penalty.

Both the defense and prosecution acknowledged at a brief hearing Monday that the amount of evidence that prosecutors have is “voluminous.” Robinson was not present for the hearing and appeared via audio from jail at his defense team’s request.

Judge Tony Graf set the next hearing for Oct. 30.

Defense attorneys for Robinson and prosecutors with the Utah County attorney’s office declined to comment after Monday’s hearing. It took place in Provo, just a few miles from the Utah Valley University campus in Orem where many students are still processing trauma from the Sept. 10 shooting and the day-and-a-half search for the suspect.

Authorities arrested Robinson when he showed up with his parents at his hometown sheriff’s office in southwest Utah, more than a three-hour drive from the site of the shooting, to turn himself in. Prosecutors have since revealed text messages and DNA evidence that they say connect Robinson to the killing.

A note that Robinson left for his romantic partner before the shooting said he had the opportunity to kill one of the nation’s leading conservative voices, “and I’m going to take it,” Utah County Atty. Jeff Gray told reporters before the first hearing. Gray also said Robinson wrote in a text about Kirk to his partner: “I had enough of his hatred.”

The killing of Kirk, a close ally of President Trump who worked to steer young voters toward conservatism, has galvanized Republicans who have vowed to carry on Kirk’s mission of moving American politics further right.

Trump has declared Kirk a “martyr” for freedom and threatened to crack down on what he called the “radical left.”

Workers across the U.S. have been punished or fired for speaking out about Kirk‘s death, including teachers, public and private employees and media personalities — most notably Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show was suspended then reinstated by ABC.

Kirk’s political organization, Arizona-based Turning Point USA, brought young, evangelical Christians into politics through his podcast, social media and campus events. Many prominent Republicans are filling in at the upcoming campus events Kirk planned to attend, including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Sen. Mike Lee at Utah State University on Tuesday.

Schoenbaum writes for the Associated Press.

In 1997, the comedy “In & Out” did its shiny, star-studded best to mainstream the story of a closeted gay man in a rock-ribbed American community embracing his truth. The fine new indie drama “Plainclothes,” which takes place in 1997 in Syracuse, N.Y., and centers on a young police officer in the throes of desire, wants to remind us that the reality of such reckonings was a bit more fraught.

In first-time screenwriter-director Carmen Emmi’s tense, sensitively threaded scenario, fresh-faced cop Lucas (Tom Blyth) isn’t just holding a secret — he’s involved in the enforced criminalization of it. His assigned undercover detail is the mall, using a seductive look (not entirely acting) to lure gay men to the restroom, silently clocking the moment they meet the minimum requirement for breaking indecent exposure laws, then having them arrested.

Something shifts inside Lucas during one of these stings, however, when he locks eyes with a target named Andrew (Russell Tovey), whose soulful return gaze promises a deeper connection than instant gratification. He spares Andrew the planned indignity waiting outside, but secures a phone number away from the watchful eye of his sergeant (Christian Cooke). Weeks later, the pair arrange to meet in the upstairs balcony of an old movie palace. (Though we never see the screen, sharp-eared film buffs will recognize allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance classic “The Conversation.”) After a couple of warm, intimate exchanges in secluded spaces, Lucas allows himself to imagine a future free from hiding, even if Andrew cautions that what they have can only ever be temporary.

Early in “Plainclothes,” thanks to changes in aspect ratio and Lucas’ facial hair, we realize that this timeline amounts to an extended memory, triggered in the present scenes by tense New Year’s Eve preparations at Lucas’ childhood home and a misplaced letter that he hopes neither his adoring, recently widowed mother (a wonderful Maria Dizzia) nor his obnoxious, hot-headed uncle (Gabe Fazio) find.

The backward-forward structure creates entwined tracks of suspense between the outcome of the Andrew relationship and the expected ramifications of what’s assumed to be a revealing letter. That framework gives “Plainclothes” the feeling of an emotional chase film where pursuer and pursued are the same, stuck in a loop of possibility, torn about what being caught really means.

Emmi’s well-conceived screenplay does justice to the ways a compartmentalized life can crack. When Lucas is with Andrew — and even in scenes with a nice ex-girlfriend (Amy Forsyth) — acceptance is palpable, understanding real. Among family, the pressure to conform activates his guardedness. And when his department, steeped in macho culture and eager for more mall arrests, starts deploying a video camera behind a one-way mirror, an increasingly anxious Lucas is made to feel nothing but risk about his identity.

There may be little that’s psychologically fresh about “Plainclothes,” but the fact that its low-key, close-framed style suggests a taut, moody gay indie you might have seen in the ’90s works in its favor. It’s also well cast, with the appealing Blyth always in control of the undercurrents, especially alongside the excellent Tovey, playing a sadder, wiser closetedness. I wish Emmi hadn’t overegged the visual motif that Lucas’ POV in moments of stress is akin to the fuzzy texture of Hi8 video: A little of it goes a long way and too often pulls us out of the tone in a room. But it’s the kind of choice that’s easier to forgive in a movie so well-attuned to shifts in perception, one that dimensionalizes the problem of achieving clarity when leading a double life.

There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.

Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction. If Johansson nails anything, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action-comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” — and there are some — Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.

That’s the good part about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently died, so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), in New York City.

Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian pooh-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, she’s alarmed to discover. Yet put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.

Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the regular meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice, declining to participate, before making the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.

Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic origins because they’re both lonely and in mourning: Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, also a recent loss. They both struggle to connect with their immediate families, Eleanor with terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Nina with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her TV anchor father, paralyzed with grief over the death of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.

Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big dramatic explosion of a revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.

It’s hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb is too endearing to stay mad at.

Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotions. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enable this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

(15) 162mins

★★★★★

WHAT time is it? It is a question Leonardo DiCaprio’s stressed-out fugitive Bob Ferguson is asked over and over again in this black comedy.

Wearing a dressing gown and bad shades, Bob doesn’t have the answer because he’s too stoned to remember the code he was given by a left-wing terror group called the French 75.

But I can tell you that the time is absolutely right for One Battle After Another.

This is a political satire that skewers both the extreme right and the extreme left at a moment when both sides are to the fore in the real world in the United States.

The time is also well overdue for this piece of cinematic dynamite that will have you on the edge of your seat — from laughter or the high-octane action.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a work of genius that fuses the best elements of his films There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights.

It begins 16 years ago with Bob helping to free refugees at a US border crossing.

During the raid his girlfriend, the wonderfully named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), orders Sean Penn’s military officer ­Steven J Lockjaw to “get up” his private parts.

The French 75’s increasingly reckless terrorism ends in a thrilling chase and Bob needing to go into hiding with the baby daughter he shares with Perfidia.

Most of the story is set in the current time, with Lockjaw coming after Bob and his daughter Willa.

As things get wilder, the audience is introduced to a bunch of incredible characters, including members of the white supremecist Christmas Adventurers Club, gun-toting nuns and Benecio Del Toro’s always-cool martial arts instructor Sergio.

The serene Del Toro is a perfect comic foil for the frantic DiCaprio who spends a lot of time running around shouting “f, f, f***.”

In one of the standout screwball moments, Sergio keeps repeating “four” as Bob is reluctant to jump out of his moving car like “Tom Cruise”. It is just one of many quotable lines.

But the most memorable scene brings the movie’s various plots to a perfect, heart-racing conclusion.

All of the cast are outstanding, with DiCaprio and newcomer Chase Infiniti as Willa most likely to be nominated for awards.

If there is any justice this film will get one Oscar after another.

GRANT ROLLINGS

3

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2

(15) 96mins

★★☆☆☆

3

DIRRECTED by Renny Harlin, this second instalment in the Strangers trilogy is a bafflingly incoherent mess.

It picks up right after the events of Chapter 1, but instead of expanding on Bryan Bertino’s original 2008 home-invasion nightmare, it devolves into a clumsy blend of ­borrowed horror tropes held together by a barely coherent backstory.

Chapter 2 follows the survivor, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), as she is relentlessly pursued by masked killers in a sleepy American town.

Despite her injuries, Maya must find the strength to stay alive and tell the tale.

Petsch is committed to the physical demands of the role, fighting a CGI boar in a bafflingly out-of-place sequence.

However, the film’s drawn-out and repetitive cat-and-mouse chases become truly unbearable.

Narratively, the film is all over the place lurching from home-invasion suspense to slasher to survival horror.

The only thing that prevents it becoming a total farce is Harlin’s occasional use of a few inspired jump scares.

As a middle chapter, this feels like a placeholder for the next film.

LINDA MARRIC

DEAD OF WINTER

(15) 98mins

★★★☆☆

3

IF you were casting for a Ramboesque heroine, Emma Thompson would not be the first name to spring to mind.

But in this rescue of a kidnap victim from a remote cabin thriller, it is the Love Actually actress displaying ingenious ways to survive.

Set in northern Minnesota in the US, Thompson’s Barb heads out in a snow storm to a lake that had a sentimental value to her recently deceased husband.

There she comes across a man who has tied up a young woman in his cellar.

Unable to go to get help, Barb vows to save the girl herself.

But the man is not her main concern, because it is a gun-toting woman played by Judy Greer who is the one with the least to lose by fighting to the bitter end.

Thompson is remarkably good when Barb is stitching up a bullet wound in her arm with fishing wire, and the attention to detail in the sets also impresses.

But choosing her isn’t enough to make this last- person-standing drama feel particularly original.

Like the tracks that Barb leaves in the snow, you know where most of the plot turns lead.

GRANT ROLLINGS

“House of Guinness,” as in the famous Dublin brewery, begins with the disclaimer “inspired by true facts,” which is another way of saying, “Don’t believe everything you’ll see.” Or, in “Dragnet”-speak, “Names have not been changed, and we have no desire or obligation to protect the innocent. This is a drama, and anyway, you can’t libel the dead.” The framing may be sound, but the portraits are imaginary.

The unchanged names in the series, which premieres Thursday on Netflix, belong to the four children of Benjamin Lee Guinness, whose grandfather created the signature porter in 1778. They are Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea). As we begin, it is 1868 and Benjamin Lee, just deceased, has left the brewery in equal shares to Arthur, who has been away in London for five years losing his accent and finding peace, and Edward, who has been pretty much running the place. Anne, only a woman, and a married one, is basically skipped over; and Benjamin, who has problems with drink and gambling, is given a small allowance, because, as expressed in his late father’s will, “I feel it wise not to burden Benjamin with the temptations that come with fortune.”

As seen here, neither Arthur nor Edward, whose professional expertise is mostly represented by signing papers and occasionally walking around his factory — you won’t learn anything about how Guinness is made — seems capable of running a brewery. But all that really matters to the show is that each is a tortured romantic and will have to find a way to thrive in their uneasy, unasked-for partnership.

Indeed, as a viewer in search of entertainment rather than enlightenment, it’s best to treat these characters, however much attached they are to the real people whose names they bear, as entirely fictional. There are also, of course, characters mixed up in this business who have no factual counterparts, and by virtue of their fates not being written in books or Wikipedia pages, are subject to the whims of series creator Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders,” “A Thousand Blows,”), creating opportunities for suspense that might otherwise be lacking.

Prime among these creations are Sean Rafferty (James Norton), the Guinness family fixer, a handsome brute whom the ladies like, and the beautiful, brilliant Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack), a Catholic firebrand who sees a better way toward Irish independence than throwing rocks at old man Guinness’ hearse or setting beer barrels on fire; for some reason, the Fenians, epitomized by Ellen’s “bonehead” brother Patrick (Seamus O’Hara), a grating presence and no advertisement for the movement, have decided that targeting Guinness (rich, Protestant) is going to get them somewhere.

James Norton as Sean Rafferty in “House of Guinness.”

(Ben Blackall / Netflix)

Apart from the politics, the family squabbles and the not particularly worrying fortunes of the family business — I mean, you can still order a Guinness — the main concerns of this historical melodrama, this stout opera, if you will, are beating hearts and heaving breasts. Skeptically accepting a meeting with Edward in the spirit of detente, Ellen feels electricity sparking between them, and vice versa. (More acceptably, Edward also has eyes for his cousin Adelaide Guinness, played by Ann Skelly, who has none for him.) Ben, meanwhile, is beloved by Lady Christine O’Madden (Jessica Reynolds), who foolishly believes she can reform him. Well, we’ve all seen that story.

But wait, there’s more! In this telling, at least, Arthur is gay, which is a problem for him as a person living in a super-religious country in the late 19th century and as a representative of the family and their eponymous product. If his orientation becomes known, it is suggested, the world will cease drinking his beer, and the family will be forced to subsist on the millions of pounds they have in the bank and whatever they can scrape off the several estates they own around the country. (Whenever contemporary figures are mentioned, screen-filling subtitles translate the sum into its 2025 equivalent, just so you realize how freaking rich these people were. The budget of the series is not sufficient to make that readily apparent.)

Arthur’s “complication,” which is no secret among his nonjudgmental siblings, has made him A) a target for blackmail, and B) a person in immediate need of a wife, especially as he’s about to stand for his late father’s seat in parliament. Enter Aunt Agnes Guinness (Dervla Kirwan), the story’s yenta, and marriage prospect Lady Olivia Hedges (Danielle Galligan), who is quite happy to settle for a maximum of freedom and a modicum of responsibility, and who curses in a most unladylike fashion. (But, really, the F-words and the Sh-words fly everywhere in this show.)

And what about Anne, saddled with a degenerative disease and a less-than-sexy cleric husband? She’ll sublimate her own romantic heartache in urban renewal and other good works. (Factually, the family had a philanthropic bent, and the company was so far ahead of its time in treating its workers well, including pensions beginning in the 1880s — that gets a moment here — and providing medical care to staff and their families, that much of this country still hasn’t caught up. They were less evolved, however, for many years, when it came to hiring Catholics.)

What else? There’s a curious Hobbit of a character named Byron Hedges (Jack Gleeson), an illegitimate cousin who arrives to sell himself as the man to represent their interests in America, into which Edward is keen to expand; we get some scenes set in New York. There’s Potter (Michael McElhatton), the droll, dry butler, who looks askance upon the younger Guinnesses but stays loyal, like butlers do. And Bonnie Champion (David Wilmot), a charismatic crime lord who’s also involved in the company’s export business.

There’s nothing subtle about “House of Guinness,” which makes its points in declarative sentences — sometimes gussied up with Irish-y prose — and gives its characters hardly a moment to relax and enjoy their porter, swelling the soundtrack with aggressive modern Irish rock and rap to make it exciting to the people of 2025. The show can border on the cornball; the characters are the sort you might have seen in the sort of dramas popular in 1868. But the actors inhabit their roles with commitment, so that even the bad company is good company. Good craic, as they say over there.

DISGRACED rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has received glowing handwritten testimonials from his fellow inmates.

The letters paint him as a positive force inside Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, despite the serious convictions hanging over him.

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The 55-year-old, awaiting sentencing next month, has reportedly been running a weekly session called “Free Game with Diddy.”

Inmates say it covers everything from entrepreneurship to health advice, while also giving them a chance to “pick his brain” about fame and money.

Douglas Welch, 42, told Judge Arun Subramanian that Combs “brings love into the Unit” and claimed the class pushed him to go “harder at my health journey.”

He wrote: “Sean Combs brings love into the unit.

“I know because since he’s been here all the Spanish and black inmates cook and pray together, workout together too…

“Since he started his class I’ve been going harder at my health journey.”

Another inmate, Quinton Davis, said the sessions included “business Management, entrepreneurship and life skills,” adding that Combs had even encouraged the group to use “AI and Chat GPT.”

“It’s a key factor and inside scoop on how Mr. Combs started from nothing and became the icon-business mogul he is today,” Davis explained.

“I also learned how to research things better by using AI and Chat GPT.”

A third prisoner insisted the rapper “brings joy and happiness to the atmosphere in the unit” and alleged that “everybody in the unit is treating and acting positively towards each other” since his arrival.

“Because of Mr Combs everybody in the unit is treating and acting positively towards each other,” the letter said.

“Mr Combs cares very much for everyone in here, doesn’t matter what race or age and he is making it his business to do his best to make an impact.”

An official evaluation form dated June 10 backs up those glowing reports.

The “Work Performance Rating – Inmate” document identifies Combs as a tutor in Unit C-B, with a handwritten note praising: “Excellent class. Keep up the great work!!!”

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The case against Combs

Combs has been jailed at MDC since his September 2024 arrest.

He was acquitted in July of headline-grabbing charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.

But he was convicted on two counts of violating the Mann Act after prosecutors said he arranged travel for women and escorts across state lines for alleged drug-fuelled “freak-offs.”

Sentencing is scheduled for October 3, 2025.

His lawyers last week filed a 380-page plea asking Judge Subramanian to impose no more than 14 months, which would mean immediate release after time served.

They cited what they described as “inhumane” jail conditions, his childhood trauma, and claimed progress in battling substance abuse.

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Over 100 letters from family and associates were also submitted, attempting to portray him as rehabilitated.

Prosecutors are expected to argue for a far stiffer punishment — reportedly four to five years — and continue to highlight allegations of violence and coercion against ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and another woman known as “Jane.”

On top of the looming sentencing, Combs is fighting multiple civil lawsuits and reputational fallout from years of abuse and exploitation claims.

For now, though, the inmates sharing his unit have presented a strikingly different picture to the judge — one of a man they say “changes the vibe” in prison.

There’s a particular niche of sophisticated, loungy music that thrived from the late ’90s into the mid-2000s. It grew out of ELO’s regal rock and Serge Gainsbourg’s loucheness, taking on bits of U.K. trip-hop, midcentury exotica, the Largo scene’s orchestral flourishes and Daft Punk’s talkboxes. I don’t quite have a word for it — conversation-pit-core? — but a primary text of it is Air’s “Moon Safari.”

The French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel released “Moon Safari,” Air’s debut LP, to wide acclaim in 1998. The band’s meticulously hazy synth pads paired beautifully with ultra-minimal funk bass and loping tempos. “Moon Safari” set a new benchmark for upmarket French pop, with singles like “Sexy Boy” and “Kelly Watch the Stars” proving they had chops for hooks as well. The band immediately followed it with the score for Sofia Coppola’s debut feature, “The Virgin Suicides,” and those two albums locked in Air as the ultimate turn-of-the-century band for tasteful European melancholy.

At the Bowl on Sunday, the band revisited the whole of “Moon Safari” with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, capping off KCRW’s festival season there. Since that album’s release, Coppola’s daughter Romy grew old enough to become an influencer herself, yet “The Virgin Suicides” remains a mood-board favorite for Gen Z. Fellow travelers like Bonobo, who opened the night with a DJ set, have become arena stars in their own right.

“Moon Safari” has held up wonderfully on its own merits. But as algorithms funnel audiences deeper into formless background listening, Sunday’s show was a reminder that chill can be compelling. Air’s intense focus gave these wispy songs a strong backbone too.

From the opener of “La Femme d’Argent,” lifted by Godin’s nimble basslines, the vibes were, as they say, immaculate. Dressed in all-white formalwear, the band took care to show how much compositional rigor went into this album’s laid-back feeling. The arrangements highlighted the nuanced tones of each of Dunckel’s many synths, and how the band’s Beatles-y chord changes could keep your ears locked into the most stark passages.

Extra credit goes to Air’s creative direction and lighting designer, who locked the band inside a rectangular elevated platform that gave the look of performing inside a James Turrell sculpture. It’s a neat conceptual challenge to visually enliven a famously blissed-out album like this onstage, and Air did it with exquisite panache on Sunday.

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra usually kicks back on shows like this, adding some sizzle and arrangement richness but functioning more as another band member. The orchestra’s horns perked up during “Ce Matin-là” and raised the dramatic temperature on closer “Le Voyage de Pénélope,” but the whole set was an exercise in restraint as a means of making sure every good idea gets its shine. “Moon Safari” didn’t need much else, but what it got was illuminating.

The back half of the set went into the band’s score work for Coppola — “Highschool Lover” and “Alone in Kyoto,” from “The Virgin Suicides” and “Lost In Translation” respectively, stirred the wistful elder millennials among the crowd, this writer included. They adopted a Daft Punk-ish distance on “Electronic Performers,” touting how “MIDI clocks ring in my mind … We need envelope filters to say how we feel,” but they didn’t really need that wink and nudge. When they broke the spell of ethereal cuts like “Cherry Blossom Girl” for heavier, krautrock-driven numbers like “Don’t Be Light,” they proved that being roused from tasteful stoned pondering is as fun as falling into it.

In our fiercely tribal and divisive culture, when consensus is illusory and we can’t seem to agree on even the most fundamental facts, the notion of shared history as a societal precept has left the building. But if we are indeed living in a post-truth era, Ian McEwan is here to tell us that things will only get worse.

In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the great British novelist posits that the past is irretrievably past, particularly in matters of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biographers to wrench it into the present is folly — or in the case of this novel’s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, intellectual vanity.

Metcalfe is an associate humanities professor and a researcher living in England in the 22nd century (2119, to be exact) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the mystery of a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we learn, once rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his wife Vivien’s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that has taken on mythic proportions in certain academic circles in the intervening years. It even has a name: The Second Immortal Dinner, in which Blundy for the first time read his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been lost long ago.

In Metcalfe’s hothouse literary universe, Blundy’s poem is important because it is a revenant. In the intervening years, interpretive speculation about it has run rampant. Some have called it a warning about climate change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an energy company to suppress the poem. Only fragments of it exist, certain fugitive lines that appear in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy’s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to find the long-lost document, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien somewhere on Blundy’s property.

Metcalfe’s task is greatly complicated by the fact that he lives in a future world where much of the planet has been either immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls “The Inundation.” There has also been a mass migration — “The Derangement” — in which millions, deprived of resources and land, have been driven from England into Africa. Entire cities have been lost, “the land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes.” Whatever repositories of learning that weren’t destroyed now exist on higher ground in the mountains, where the “knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved.”

The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Metcalfe, the digital world of the past is intact. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are “heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’ ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.” Here in the cloud are the many hundreds of emails and texts from Blundy, his wife and their circle, allowing Metcalfe the satisfaction of knowing he can piece together the events of the epochal dinner party down to granular details: cutlery used, foods prepared, toasts proffered.

Ian McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

(Annalena McAfee)

What Metcalfe knows of the Blundys’ life together can be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien’s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a brilliant literary scholar and teacher, had willfully lived out her marriage under Blundy’s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. “She enjoyed producing a well-turned meal,” Metcalfe posits. “She was once a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it had surprised her how … she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.”

Despite the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe knows he must find the lost poem, that it is the keystone without which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails in this task Metcalfe, already feeling like an “intruder on the intentions and achievements” of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his career stalled.

But just when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across land and water, has discovered something significant, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, back to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the basic contours conform to Metcalfe’s version of events: Vivien did forsake her academic ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he read aloud on her birthday, and so on.

But Metcalfe, as it turns out, has the details right and the motives all wrong, never more so than when McEwan reveals the fact of a murder, conceived in such a way that no snooping academic could ever unearth it. Emails are composed yet remain unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions that are beyond the biographer’s grasp. Metcalfe’s thesis is driven by a romanticized notion of Blundy’s life, but as McEwan slowly and carefully reveals, his poem, ostensibly a “repository of dreams,” more closely resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is far from the whole story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her career, simmering with resentment. Despite his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is moving down an errant path that will never square the facts with lived experience.

Of course, facts are important, but they don’t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events. Metcalfe’s pursuit of revelation in a single lost poem is magical thinking, a relentless grasping for a chimera. McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

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

“Is football a game or a religion?” the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell once asked with exasperation. The horror film “Him,” a striking but vacuous gridiron Grand Guignol by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) takes it as faith that the answer is both. Any fan with a sacred good luck ritual and any player who’s thanked the man upstairs for a touchdown knows the two overlap as tightly as a freshly laced pigskin.

In the home of young elementary schooler Cameron Cade (Austin Pulliam), the fictional San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the messiah. Next to the TV, there’s even a shrine with devotional portraits of their icon. When White wins a game while suffering a nasty injury, Cameron’s father seizes the moment to deliver a sermon: “That’s what real men do,” he insists. “They make sacrifices.” The candles on the altar flicker ominously.

Tipping, working from a Blacklist script by Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers with Jordan Peele as his producer, considers the sports-as-religion idea so obvious that the film doesn’t bother analyzing why it exists. Instead, “Him” wonders what kind of spiritual practice it is: hero worship or a sinister cult?

Fourteen years later, Cameron (now played by Tyriq Withers) has grown up to become a star college quarterback in line to be the NFL’s top draft pick and take over Isaiah’s position on the Saviors. A violent concussion knocks him off course, but Isaiah, a living legend still leading the team, offers to vouch for the kid if he passes a private training camp at his intimidating desert estate. It couldn’t be more obvious that Isaiah doesn’t have Cameron’s best interests at heart if he blared a warning on the Jumbotron.

The film’s title comes from a bit of braggadocio — “I’m him” — that started sprouting up in sports leagues during the last five years. (It’s why you’ll sometimes see Lakers shooting guard Austin Reaves called “AustHIM” Reaves.) Anointing someone the GOAT, as in “Greatest of All Time,” has been around longer, but the silly thing about both compliments is they’re getting handed out like Halloween candy. Whether Cameron can become the next GOAT is the movie’s main obsession. Yet it resonates, albeit vague and unexplored, with biblical references to goat offerings and images of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb and the movie’s visual allusions to the goat-headed occult idol Baphomet. Plus, it offers us in the audience the thrill of wondering if someone will get spit-roasted.

Cameron enters Isaiah’s home to discover his host surrounded by what looks like taxidermy sheep skins. Nearly all of the film takes place in his compound, a circular warren that looks like a combination of an ancient temple and the Superdome. We’re continually happy to discover all the menacing delights that production designer Jordan Ferrer has concocted. Inside, there’s unnerving minimalist furniture, dramatic saunas and ice baths and an indoor football field with a throwing machine powerful enough to knock out a tooth. Even more terrifying, there’s Isaiah’s lifestyle-influencer wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), who stomps around with a pointy shard of jade that Cameron is supposed to stick up his rear. (You know, for peak performance.) Meanwhile, outside the gates, Isaiah’s cult followers — like visibly brain-fried Marjorie (Naomi Grossman) — are furious that their champion may retire.

Like “Kicks,” Tipping’s excellent 2016 feature debut about a kid who risks his neck for a pair of Nikes, “Him” is about the bloody quest for respect. It wants to be “The Substance” with jockstraps: a Satanic-tinged, steroidal “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms. Every shot is a stunner, from stark images of eerily spinning footballs to goalposts that loom like devil’s horns. Editor Taylor Joy Mason and cinematographer Kira Kelly have put together queasy-brilliant montages with some kind of an eye-popping camera technique — a mix of thermal imaging, X-ray footage and visual effects — that seems to see right inside the actors’ bodies to their gristle and goo. Bobby Krlic (a.k.a. the Haxan Cloak), who also composed the music for “Midsommar,” wows us with a tragic, thundering score.

But the movie’s thoughts about pain and devotion and locker-room manipulation are still gestating. After I made it to the end of the story and ran it back, little of the plot hung together. I couldn’t with any conviction answer rudimentary questions such as how much does Cameron even want to play football? Or what in Hades will happen to the surviving characters?

Part of the issue is that Tipping and Withers have created a rising football player who might be too authentic. Withers moves with physical confidence and perfect posture and drilled obedience. Participating in a mock media training day, you buy that he was born to sell sneakers.

He speaks with an athlete’s guardedness, too, that post-game interview cadence where each wooden sentence tries to bore the camera into leaving them alone. Cameron describes his football career clinically and neutrally like he’s a product; he refers to himself “performing,” not “playing,” as the latter would imply he’s on the field to have fun.

Surrounded by trainers and doctors and his childhood hero, he acquiesces to pretty much everything, from receiving random injections to a brutal bludgeoning. (At least he doesn’t do you-know-what with that jade crystal.) I’m willing to blame some of that passivity on his head injury, but it’s hard to care about a character who only has a personality for three minutes.

At least Wayans gets to cut loose. His bullying Isaiah sprints from pep talks to threats in the same breath and runs around in nifty outfits covered in weighted beads. He’s in such peak physical condition that you believe Isaiah’s conviction that it’s possible to outrace Father Time. Realizing afterward that Wayans is 53 — almost a decade older than Tom Brady when he retired after announcers even more bold than Cosell treated him like Methuselah — you just might be tempted to bow down to Baphomet yourself.

What a piquant moment for Nine Inch Nails to be back on the road playing their version of David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

At the Forum on Thursday, for the first show of a final two-night stand of the electronic-rock band’s Peel It Back arena tour, singer Trent Reznor didn’t elaborate on the freshly resonant subtext in Bowie’s song (one that Reznor remixed for the late Brit and, in its music video, played a Travis Bickle-esque creep).

But you could feel the sold-out Forum roil with new unease at that squelching industrial song, as Reznor muttered Bowie’s scabrous lyrics about “No one needs anyone … Johnny wants p— and cars … God is an American.”

At this point, who isn’t a little afraid of Americans? Nine Inch Nails thrive in the murk of base human instinct and tech-driven dread. Who better to help us limn out these feelings of disgust, rage and desolation right now?

Now in their fourth decade as a group, Nine Inch Nails — the duo of Reznor and producer/keyboardist Atticus Ross along with a closely held touring band — does two difficult things extraordinarily well.

For 15 years, Reznor and Ross have served as Hollywood’s eminent techno-intellectuals, with a pair of Oscar wins for their film scores including the brooding lashes of David Fincher’s “The Social Network” and the yearning ambiance of Pixar’s “Soul.” They have an upcoming film-music festival, Future Ruins, that will be the first of its kind and caliber in Los Angeles.

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1. Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails. 2. Trent Reznor. 3. Fans react as Nine Inch Nails perform at Kia Forum. (Hon Wing Chiu / For The Times)

But Thursday’s Forum show was a decadent reminder of just how nasty and violent this band can be as well.

Opening on the smaller, in-the-round B-stage, Reznor took a solo-piano run through “Right Where It Belongs,” gradually adding Ross, bassist-keyboardist Alessandro Cortini and guitarist Robin Finck into a squalling “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now),” before finally introducing drummer Josh Freese on the calisthenic drum workout of “Wish.”

Freese was a last-minute addition to the touring band, after the group unexpectedly swapped percussionists with Foo Fighters days before Peel It Back kicked off. But Freese — an NIN veteran of the mid-2000s — has become a fan-favorite returning hero, bolstering this lineup with pure rocker muscle.

Back on the main stage, they redlined through “March of the Pigs” and seethed with fuzzbox rot on “Reptile.” They veiled the stage in gauze on “Copy of A,” casting dozens of Reznor shadows while he strutted and howled about a despondent, depersonalized modernity.

A second pass through the rave-ready B-stage gave a hint at what the band’s cryptically billed upcoming Coachella set might look like. “Nine Inch Noize” — implying an ongoing collaboration with their opener and collaborator, the German club music producer Boys Noize — took form here under a monolithic, blood-colored lightbox. Reznor, Ross and Boys Noize revved up a new single, “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” from the film “Tron: Ares,” but also revamped the eternal hit “Closer” and “Came Back Haunted” with an after-hours sizzle.

It’s impossible to imagine a single as desperately sexual, as sacrilegiously sacred as “Closer” ever making it to the Hot 100 today. For the Gen Z fans fascinated by Nails’ gothic-erotic aesthetic, it felt more transgressive than ever.

After slashed-up takes on “The Perfect Drug” and “The Hand That Feeds,” the band closed out the set with an opposing pair of songs that covered the full range of what its audience is likely going through today. How viscerally satisfying to scream “Head like a hole, black as your soul / I’d rather die than give you control” as American life seems to unravel with each passing hour.

But of course, the band closed on “Hurt.” Johnny Cash recorded his canonical version at 70, a cover now synonymous with a lion in winter starting down the grave. Just 10 years younger at 60, Reznor performed it Thursday with all the tightly coiled emotion and intimate grandeur of the kid who wrote it. American life is pain; Nine Inch Nails endures.

Sept. 19 (UPI) — After nearly 12 years of review and controversy, Chile’s Supreme Court has rejected appeals from President Gabriel Boric’s government and environmental groups that seek to block the Dominga mining project.

The potential mine, situated in the Coquimbo region, has been one of Chile’s most controversial in recent years because of its proximity to the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve, home to penguins, sea lions and bottlenose dolphins.

It was first submitted for an environmental impact study in September 2013.

The high court’s ruling does not give the project a green light to operate, but sends it back to the Committee of Ministers — made up of the economy, health, energy, mining and agriculture ministries — that already voted against it three times.

The decision is a blow to the government because it must review the case again and issue a verdict.

Dominga involves a $2.5 billion investment and about 30,000 jobs. It was expected to produce 12 million tons of high-grade iron concentrate and 150,000 tons of copper concentrate annually over a 26 1/2-year lifespan.

“This is a historic ruling, not only for the company but also for the country and its environmental institutions. Dominga is the project with the longest review in the 30 years of the Environmental Impact Assessment System, becoming a true symbol of bureaucracy and judicialization,” Andes Iron, the company that owns the project, said after the ruling.

“With this decision, more than 12 years of procedures and litigation come to an end, clearing all legal and technical questions and opening the way for Dominga’s construction,” the company added. It said the actions of the Committee of Ministers had been irregular, “with legal flaws, unjustified delays and unsupported changes in technical criteria.”

The Confederation of Production and Commerce, which represents Chile’s business sector, also welcomed the ruling.

“It is a clear confirmation that the project complies with current regulations and with all environmental requirements for its construction and operation,” the group’s president, Susana Jiménez, said in a statement.

She added that the “long and cumbersome process Dominga has had to face is proof of the urgent need for a more transparent and technical environmental review system — one that allows projects meeting established requirements to move forward without obstacles.”

The government has not given up, however, saying the Supreme Court’s ruling “does not imply a final decision on the project,” according to the Environment Ministry, one of Dominga’s main opponents.

“The Supreme Court also reaffirms that authority to decide on the project lies with the Committee of Ministers, which already issued a decision in January 2025. The Humboldt Archipelago is a unique ecosystem, a heritage of all Chileans, and the Environment Ministry continues to work decisively for its protection,” the agency said.

Economic analyst Jorge Berríos, academic director of the Finance Program at the University of Chile’s Faculty of Economics and Business, told UPI that Dominga is “a special project, with a strong political component, because it was linked to former President Sebastián Piñera.”

In 2010, the right-wing former president sold his stake in the project for $152 million while in office, a period in which he placed his investments in a blind trust.

The sales agreement included a clause stating that the final payment would only be made if the area where Dominga is located was not declared an environmental reserve by the Chilean government — a condition that was ultimately met.

“From that moment, Dominga took on a political character. The current government does not want it and should be more explicit about that. The company has decided to pursue every legal avenue because it already has its environmental permits,” Berríos said.

He added that the conflict highlights Chile’s serious institutional problem in approving investment projects.

“If a company has to wait five or 10 years to get a permit, it will think twice and move to another country. This cannot happen because it hurts the country’s competitiveness. It has already happened that the forestry company Arauco decided not to invest in Chile but did so in Brazil, where it obtained operating permits in just nine months,” Berríos said.

Without a doubt, it is important to capture the reflections of a vice president who found herself in an unprecedented situation after the president was pressured to withdraw from the 2024 election. And “107 Days,” a taut, often eye-opening account — written with the help of Geraldine Brooks — takes you inside the rooms where it happened, as well as what led up to Kamala Harris’ remarkable run.

For one, apparently MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell first gave Harris the idea she should seek the presidency in 2020. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were having breakfast at a restaurant near their Brentwood home when O’Donnell “wandered up to our table to talk about the dire consequences of a second Trump term.” Harris, then in her first term as a U.S. senator, recounts that O’Donnell bluntly suggested: “‘You should run for president.’ I honestly had not thought about it until that moment,” she writes in “107 Days.”

Later, Harris also reveals that Tim Walz was not her first choice for running mate: Pete Buttigieg was, though she ultimately concluded the country wasn’t ready for a gay man in the role.

“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she writes. She assumes Buttigieg felt similarly, but they never discussed it.

We do not glean much more than we already knew or assumed about President Biden’s life-changing 2024 phone call that set Harris on this path. Pleas for Biden to step aside had been building following his disastrous debate performance less than five months before the election, but by that time Harris had given up on the idea that he would withdraw from the race. But on Sunday, July 21, Harris had just finished making pancakes for her grandnieces at the vice president’s residence and was settling in to watch a cooking show with them when “No Caller ID” came up on her secure phone.

“I need to talk to you,” Biden rasps, then battling COVID-19. Without fanfare, he told her: “I’ve decided I’m dropping out.” “Are you sure?” Harris replies, to which Biden responds: “I’m sure. I’m going to announce in a few minutes.” In italics, we are made privy to what Harris is thinking during their brief phone call: “Really?” Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants.”

If we wanted in on the powerful feelings that must have been swirling within each of them during such an exchange, or a nod to the momentousness of the moment — no dice. The conversation shifted to the timing of Biden’s endorsement of Harris, which Biden’s staff wanted to delay and which she wanted immediately. Politics, not sentiment, reigned.

The Atlantic book excerpt published earlier this month, it turns out, accurately represents the overall tone of “107 Days.” A thread running throughout is one of bitterness toward Biden’s inner circle, whom Harris felt had been poisoning the well since she first took office: “The public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage,” she recounts, and perhaps laid the groundwork for her defeat. While she had a warm relationship with the president himself, Harris believes she was never trusted by the first lady or the president’s closest advisors, nor did they throw their full weight behind her as the Democratic nominee.

At the same time, she never doubted that she was the right person for the job. She writes, “I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. … The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition.” She also calculates that the president and his team thought she was the least bad option to replace him because “I was the only person who would preserve his legacy.” “At this point,” she adds, “anyone else was bound to throw him — and all the good he had achieved — right under the bus.”

For those who are cynical about politics, “107 Days” will not alter your view. After Biden announces his withdrawal, First Lady Jill Biden welcomes Second Gentleman Emhoff into the fray, advising: “Be careful what you wish for. You’re about to see how horrible the world is.” Her senior adviser David Plouffe encourages Harris to distance herself from the president on the campaign trail, because “People hate Joe Biden.” Again and again, Harris provides examples of being left out of the loop or not robustly supported by his inner circle. She writes that her feelings for the president “were grounded in warmth and loyalty” but had become “more complicated over time.” She claims never to have doubted Biden’s competence, even while she worried about how he appeared to the public.

“On his worst day,” she writes, “he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump at his best.” Still, his decision about seeking a second term shouldn’t “have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition,” she concludes in an observation that grabbed headlines upon its publication in the Atlantic excerpt.

The exhilaration that Harris’ campaign frequently exuded in those early rallies is summarized here, but those accounts don’t capture the joy. Some of the details she chooses to highlight tamp down the excitement. For example, at their first rally together after picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, Walz, Harris and their families greet an audience of 10,000 people in Philadelphia. Though Harris writes, “We rode the high of the crowd that night,” she also notes, “When Tim clasped my hand to thrust it high in an enthusiastic victory gesture, he was so tall that the entire front of my jacket rose up.” She makes “a mental note to tell him: From now on, when we do that, you gotta bend your elbow.”

The Kamala Harris I saw on the campaign trail and enthusiastically voted for is often in evidence on the page. She is smart, savvy, funny and tough. As in many of her stump speeches and media interviews, she tends to recite her accomplishments as if reading from a resume, which sometimes reads as defensive. But she is also indefatigable: She believes that she must win to save democracy, yet she seems to shoulder that formidable burden without breaking a sweat.

“107 Days” does an excellent job of conveying the difficulty of seeking — and occupying — high office, and suggests that if she’d won, Harris’ resilience and ambition would have served her well as the leader of the free world. Many of her insights are astute, though occasionally tinged with rancor. She does accept responsibility for certain missteps, such as when she was asked on “The View” if she would have done anything differently than Biden had she been in charge. She reflects that her response — “There is nothing that comes to mind” — landed as if she’d “pulled the pin on a hand grenade.” But she doesn’t attribute her eventual loss to that or any other miscalculation: She simply needed more time to make her case.

I craved a soaring moment, a rallying cry. I didn’t find hope or inspiration within these pages — the book felt more like an obligatory postmortem with an already established conclusion. If an aim of this memoir was to rally the troops for a Harris run in 2028, “107 Days” falls short of lighting a fire. The brilliant, charismatic woman who came close to breaking the ultimate glass ceiling has given us an essential portrait of an unforgettable turning point in her journey, but “107 Days” is mainly absent the perspective and blueprint for going forward that so many of us hunger for. A few years out, that wisdom may come.

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

Insolent schoolkids and educators with the stamina and sensitivity to reach them is a sentimental formula so familiar, it could stand a pantsing in the hallway between classes.

Which makes it a good thing that “Steve,” starring Cillian Murphy as a dedicated, troubled head teacher at a struggling reform school for chaos-inclined teenage boys, brings a raucously corrective attitude to bear.

Teachers are sorely undervalued in this world, and a more thorny, realistic view of the profession’s challenges has made its way into the culture of late, between the Oscar-nominated German film “The Teachers’ Lounge,” Hirokazu Kore-ada’s “Monster” and Netflix’s Emmys-gobbling hit “Adolescence.” And while “Steve,” which takes place over a day, is ultimately too messy itself to measure up to those more tightly coiled efforts, its energy makes a statement, as if the legacy of the late, system-smashing British director Alan Clarke were close at hand.

“Steve” marks the second feature collaboration between Murphy and Belgian director Tim Mielants, following their excellent 2024 adaptation of Claire Keegan’s story “Small Things Like These.” This one, too, derives from a book — “Shy” by Max Porter. In adapting his own work, Porter shifts focus from his novella’s title adolescent, a disturbed soul in mid-tumble, who in the film is still a central figure (vividly rendered by Jay Lycurgo), to the teacher character for whom the movie is named, which the Oscar-winning Murphy turns into another immersive portrayal of dark-hued, guilt-flecked intensity.

Steve’s compassion is the beating heart of Stanton Wood, a privately bankrolled school in an old manor in the English countryside, whose core staff — including Steve’s plain-talking deputy, Amanda (Tracey Ullman), and unflappable therapist Jenny (Emily Watson) — are committed to its last-chance ethos of pulling unhappy delinquents from the brink. But this is Britain in 1996 and these hot-headed young men (played by a lively mix of first-timers and experienced actors) prefer the numbing tempo of drum and bass or a well-timed punch or thrown object.

Stopping fights is a full-time a job, and Steve’s chummy de-escalation style attests to how much he cares. But on top of the day’s regular behavior management, there’s also a prying documentary crew, a visit from a local MP (a perfectly pompous Roger Allam) that goes south and what turns out to be a bad-news report from the school’s wealthy backers. When Steve explodes on them, one senses his volatile students have been teaching him something too.

And yet “Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work. Its social realist roots are kept from growing the more it relies on visual/sonic turbulence (hallucinatory images, a flashy drone shot) and narrative shorthands (the overdone documentary framing).

But when “Steve” zeroes in on its characters — Shy on a disturbing call with his fed-up mum, Steve fighting his own demons or in the zone — the movie captures the electric hum of unpredictability and vulnerability. At its best, we understand why these people want to keep the lights on in a dark, unforgiving world.

Disasters are real — also, these days, frighteningly common, be they epic confluences of nature and negligence or the murderous and preventable kind. And when it comes to disaster movies, it’s hard to know what the acceptable level of exploitation is.

Of course, director Paul Greengrass could never be confused with the unseriousness of producer Irwin Allen (“The Towering Inferno”) or filmmaker Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow”), ringmasters who preferred heaping helpings of A-listers on slick, expensive calamities. Rather, when Greengrass, coming from documentaries, tackles dark days of mass casualty, they tend to be true stories like “United 93” and “Bloody Sunday.” His stripped-down, jagged style, absent marquee names and focused on such issues as terrorism and community, brings intelligent urgency to the unfathomable.

With his new film “The Lost Bus,” however, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, about the real-life effort to save a busload of schoolchildren from the 2018 Camp fire, a wildfire that would destroy most of Paradise, Calif., Greengrass is trying to merge the two sensibilities. This time he mixes star heroism with you-are-there spectacle and the results can be galvanizing if awkwardly framed.

“The Lost Bus” is not as potent as Greengrass’ “Captain Phillips,” in which Tom Hanks anchored a re-created reality no less pulse-pounding than any action blockbuster. Instead the director seems to be in a programmatic mode. There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

McConaughey plays Paradise bus driver Kevin McKay, whose life is almost comically scripted to come off as especially challenged before one lick of flame gets near it: strapped for cash, dying dog, recently dead father (no love lost), sullen teenage son (love lost), ex-wife (also unhappy) and a memory-ailing mother. But on the afternoon of Nov. 18 as the fires reach eastern Paradise, Kevin’s is the only bus that can meet a request from his dispatcher (Ashlie Atkinson): Pick up stranded elementary schoolkids and evacuate them to safety.

A failed dad feeling the weight of sudden responsibility, Kevin corrals as co-chaperone a schoolteacher (America Ferrera). Though Mary is a mother eager to get to her own child, she’s willing to help. The occasional cut to Yul Vazquez as the fire chief spearheading rescue efforts, however, is this movie’s barometer of increasingly bad news. As smoke quickly darkens the day and the unstoppable, town-hopping fire hems in the bus, cutting off routes, the journey takes a dystopian turn, raising the stakes and alarm levels to unimaginable heights. (Eaton and Palisades survivors, fair warning — you were never going to watch this anyway.)

McConaughey is solid casting, his unshowy working-class fortitude slightly tinged with fear. In his and Ferrera’s sturdy presence and in the serrated frenzy of Greengrass’ editing style, a shorter, tighter “The Lost Bus” would still hold plenty of dread and dramatic resilience. The fire sequences alone, captured in the hellish fuzz of Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography, are pinnacles of this practical-meets-digital-effects discipline. But Kevin’s dippy redemption arc, doled out midperil in tortured glances and forced dialogue, drags us out of the intensity.

It’s also odd that the activist-minded Greengrass didn’t do more with so corporate a villain: legally responsible utility PG&E, represented in the movie by an ineffectual suit who is briefly yelled at. Forget that redemption story — Greengrass could have leaned even more into those action tropes and, as a final touch, had McConaughey punch PG&E in the jaw.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to direct their career, but can I just say how glad I am to learn that Jason Bateman, who spent four seasons in the darkness of “Ozark,” is making a comedy again. (A “dark comedy,” but still.) That’s not the series he’s starring in at the moment for Netflix, however, but something called “DTF St. Louis,” for HBO, from “Patriot” creator Steve Conrad, which isn’t arriving until next year. Fingers crossed, we’ll all be around to see it.

In the eight-episode miniseries “Black Rabbit,” which premieres Thursday, Bateman and Jude Law play brothers Vince and Jake Friedkin, respectively, who long before the story begins were partners in a rock band, the Black Rabbits — successful enough that Vince is recognized in a bar (but not so successful that the fans can remember his name, or the name of the band). More recently, they had been partners in a far downtown Manhattan restaurant, also called Black Rabbit, though Vince’s level of current participation is muddy. (At one time, he ran the upstairs bar.) It isn’t a comedy, in spite of Vince’s Michael Bluth-like habit of dropping ironic quips into stressful situations.

The setting brings to mind “The Bear” — which is a comedy — as does its young genius chef, Roxie (Amaka Okafor); the New York Times is planning a review and New York magazine is putting her on the cover. We see that the restaurant, which has a VIP floor upstairs for horrible rich jerks, is a hit because the place is packed, and because there’s a lot of shouting in the barely pictured kitchen, but food, barely shown or talked about, is not really on the menu here. Jake is more interested in property and expansion — he has an inside track to lease the Pool Room, a real-life space in New York’s fabled Four Seasons Hotel, and he wants Roxie to run the kitchen and Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman), who is in a relationship with his old friend Wes (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) — now a mega successful musician, a co-owner of the Black Rabbit and a jealous guy — to design it. From camera angles and cutting, it’s clear that Vince and Estelle are attracted to one another, but as Law and Coleman have no particular chemistry, it feels more stated than felt. But it’s important.

Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Wes, a co-owner of the Black Rabbit, and Amaka Okafor as Roxie, the head chef.

(Netflix)

Vince, meanwhile, is living out west, looking like he’s ready to audition for a late-life Dennis Wilson biopic and trying to sell some valuable old coins. When he’s set up and robbed in his car, he winds up running over one of the thieves — twice. Whether by writerly intention or inattention, this will be no more of an emotional issue for Vince than it will have anything to do with the rest of the story, apart from sending him back to NYC, where he is $140,000 in the hole over gambling debts. Whenever he’s not in actual danger (which is a lot of the time), he’s weirdly happy-go-lucky.

Jake has a well-to-do ex-wife, Val (Dagmara Dominczyk), who seems nice, and a son, Hunter (Michael Cash), taking dancing lessons. They all get along fine, though Jake battles that most common of TV paternal ailments, Busy Dad Syndrome. (He does better than most.) Vince has an adult daughter, tattoo artist Gen (Odessa Young), who is not especially glad to see him back in town. Their safety will become a chip in the series’ central business, which sets Vince, and ultimately Jake, against vaguely defined mobster Joe Mancuso (Oscar-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur, from the film “CODA,” in one of the series’ more layered performances); his sweaty idiot caricature of a wannabe tough guy son, Junior (Forrest Weber); and Junior’s less-than-efficient minder, Babbitt (Chris Coy), who is occasionally sort of likable, albeit one feels bad for sort of liking him. In the small world these characters inhabit, Mancuso was close to the brothers’ dysfunctional family back in Coney Island. But business is business.

Like most every streaming drama nowadays, “Black Rabbit” opens with a flash forward to a more exciting part of the story — here, a robbery and shooting at a crowded party — before dialing back to a calmer chronological beginning. This lets the viewer know that, though there is going to be exposition for a while, things will get crazy eventually. And they very much do, including sexual assault, murder and bad management.

Junior (Forrest Weber), Babbitt (Chris Coy) and Vince (Jason Bateman), who owes them lots of money.

(Netflix)

Jake, chasing his Pool Room dream, has his own money troubles, and the brothers’ needs will clash as one scheme after another to set things right goes wrong and their relationship rockets between heated arguments and brotherly reminiscence. It’s too easy to stop listening to the arguments, which tend to go long and not lead anywhere, but there is some relief (and nice writing) as regards the reminiscence. Still, though later episodes will reveal an early event that might explain something about Vince, it’s not enough to make one care especially what happens to them, except to worry which innocent bystanders, including the Black Rabbit staff, will be hit by shrapnel when things go boom.

A large secondary and sometimes confusing cast comes in and out to propel and complicate matters, but it’s really all about the brothers. As Vince, Bateman — who also directed the first two episodes, efficiently, with “Ozark” co-star Laura Linney helming the second two — leavens an exasperating character with his innate likability. He’s a fine actor, but he’s also Jason Bateman, America’s sweetheart. By contrast, as the tense, excitable Jake, Law doesn’t generate much warmth, or make you believe he’s actually capable of opening a high-class midtown restaurant. (The funky but chic Black Rabbit was Vince’s vision.) That may be the idea, of course. And he does love his brother.

There are only so many ways this story can go, and it does indeed go to one of them, though it’s so likely by the time we get there that it doesn’t deliver much of an emotional charge. An epilogical montage, in a complete tonal turnaround, plays like an homage to the opening of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” cut to Rodgers and Hart’s “I’ll Take Manhattan”; its only purpose seems to be to make you less bad than you might have otherwise felt. (Hey, Katz’s Delicatessen!) So … thanks?

Meanwhile — “DTF St. Louis!” See you next year! Knock wood.

“Eureka Day,” a comedy by Jonathan Spector that wades into the debate on vaccine mandates, has only become more explosively topical since its 2018 premiere at Aurora Theatre Company, in Berkeley, Calif.

The play, which is having its Los Angeles premiere at Pasadena Playhouse, seems like it could have been commissioned to skewer this destructive, benighted and completely mortifying anti-science moment. But Spector wrote the work before the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed our political demons and made stupid great again.

“Eureka Day” takes its name from the fictional private elementary school in Berkeley that is the setting for what is both a satire of anti-vaccine culture and a comedy of woke manners. Held in a determinedly cheerful Bay Area classroom (brightly summoned with all the necessary social justice touches by set designer Wilson Chin), the play unfolds as a series of meetings of the school’s executive committee.

Don (Rick Holmes), the head of school, is ostensibly in charge, though his duck-and-cover strategy for dealing with conflict has a way of protracting problems. Four parents, one a newcomer still acclimating to the school’s strenuously progressive rules, are part of the executive brain trust.

The first discussion of the new school year is relatively innocuous though no less testing for being so. Eli (Nate Corddry), a stay-at-home dad who made a fortune at Facebook, has proposed adding “Transracial Adoptee” to a drop-down menu on an admissions form already burgeoning with identity subcategories.

Suzanne (Mia Barron), a mother who has sent so many children through Eureka Day that she has a proprietary attitude about the place, doesn’t think this additional category is necessary. She’s sensitive — self-consciously so — to Eli’s good intentions, but she persuades the group that no changes are necessary at this time.

“Persuades” might be a euphemism. Suzanne has an iron will that she thinly veils with a solicitous smile.

One of the quirks of the executive committee is that it operates by consensus rather than a majority vote. This can lead to some “very long meetings,” Suzanne informs Carina (Cherise Boothe), the new Black lesbian mom who recently moved from Maryland.

Suzanne claims to want everyone to feel “empowered,” though her controlling temperament pokes through her welcoming facade. Meiko (Camille Chen), who knits during meetings with a subtle air of annoyance, has to loudly ask Suzanne to please stop speaking on her behalf.

Cherise Boothe in “Eureka Day” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

These blind spots, a standard ingredient of comic characters, are particularly glaring in Suzanne’s case. When Carina tells her that she didn’t homeschool her son for kindergarten but sent him to public school, Suzanne is mildly horrified. She also makes the assumption that Carina is not a “full pay” family.

There’s even something passive-aggressive about Suzanne’s show of concern for all viewpoints, a trait that becomes all the more conspicuous after a crisis erupts at the school. A mumps outbreak forces Eureka Day to temporarily close its doors.

Don informs the executive committee that the health department has issued a letter stipulating what parents must do for their child to return to school. The subject isn’t open for debate, but Suzanne is uneasy about how this letter is being “framed.”

She’s an advocate of parental choice when it comes to vaccines, not trusting the experts who have determined that only children who are vaccinated can return to school when there’s a risk of infection. She believes vaccines stand in the way of natural herd immunity.

Mia Barron, left, Rick Holmes, Cherise Boothe, and Camille Chen in “Eureka Day” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Meiko is less vociferous in her anti-vaccine stance than Suzanne, but she has her own skepticism about modern medicine and doesn’t want to be told what to do. When her daughter develops mumps, it becomes an emergency for Eli, who’s been having an affair with Meiko. The two arrange their assignations around playdates, and their kids were recently in contact.

Eli, who’s married but in a complicated open relationship situation with his increasingly resentful wife, would rather not have to choose sides in the vaccine mandate debate. But when his son gets sick after spending time with Meiko’s unvaccinated daughter, he finds he can no longer stay on the fence.

The well-programmed comedy hilariously runs its course in the leadership vacuum created by the school’s over-accommodating culture. Don is so worried about seeming to favor one parental faction over another that he allows Suzanne to become the dominant voice in the room.

The production, directed by Teddy Bergman, has a field day with the woke-run-amok ethos of Eureka Day, where kids at the school cheer the other team’s goals at soccer games. But Bergman’s approach is more schematic than Anna D. Shapiro’s Tony-winning Broadway revival.

Perhaps the urgency of the moment calls for a clearer moral stand, but the comedy has lost some nuance. On Broadway, Jessica Hecht made Suzanne seem totally oblivious to her own rage. She really believed that she was seeking consensus, tolerant of all perspectives as long as they didn’t impinge on her beliefs, the origins of which are poignantly related later in the play.

The fury of Barron’s Suzanne is much more on the surface. The humor is more direct — Barron can be very funny — but the debate is less trenchant. Bergman’s production, marred by blasts of jarring folk music between scene transitions, is a little too on the nose.

Boothe’s Carina, by far the strongest performance in the cast, is our rational surrogate in the play — a parent trying to fit in without betraying her intelligence or child’s welfare. I appreciated the way Holmes lets us come to our own conclusions about Don’s go-along-to-get-along style of running the ship.

Meiko is woefully underwritten, and Chen’s performance, while amusing when Meiko erupts, sometimes seems disconnected. Corddry refuses to play a tech industry cliché, but Eli, a bland creep, comes off as unnecessarily vague.

Bergman has trouble locating that sweet spot between jokey exaggeration and multidimensional authenticity. Comedy trades in types, but the cast could have benefited from more fine-tuning.

Perhaps that’s why the funniest scene in the play involves the live chat portion of a virtual meeting that’s organized for Eureka Day parents alarmed about the quarantine situation. Avatars square off against one another in a vaccine debate free-for-all that puts the lie to the school’s “community of respect” motto with uncensored savagery punctuated by missile-like emoticons.

“Eureka Day” will make you laugh, but how much this production will make you think is an open question.

There were two questions the 77th Emmy Awards, held Sunday night at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, had to answer, other than who would win what. (It’s an honor just to be nominated.)

One was how the show, a glittery evening devoted to the most popular of popular arts, would play against a world gone mad. The other, not distinct from the first, was how first-time host Nate Bargatze would do.

The ceremony is hosted by a round robin of the major networks, and this year the honor fell to CBS, whose corporate overlord, Paramount, has come to represent capitulation to the Trump administration, settling a baseless lawsuit in what is widely viewed as a payoff to grease the wheels of its merger with Skydance and promising to eliminate its DEI protocols. Executive interference in the news department amid an apparent rightward turn has led to the resignations of “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens and CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon. And there’s the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” the timing of which some have found suspicious.

But if your goal was to avoid insulted celebrities, social media outrage or petulant notes from the White House, you could have done no better than to hire Bargatze, a clean, calm, classical, noncontroversial, nonpolitical, very funny, very successful comedian. Bargatze, who has been in comedy since 2002, saw his career explode over the last few years; his appeal is not so much mainstream, which is to say soft-edged, as it is broad — something for everybody.

The show opened quite brilliantly — perhaps confusingly, if you had missed Bargatze’s “Washington’s Dream” sketches on “Saturday Night Live” on which the routine was closely modeled, including the presence of Mikey Day, Bowen Yang and James Austin Johnson — with the host as Philo T. Farnsworth, “the inventor of television,” foreseeing the medium’s less than sensible future. First presenter Stephen Colbert followed immediately to a standing ovation and chants of his name. “While I have your attention, is anyone hiring? I have 200 very qualified candidates with me tonight who will be available in June.”

Emmys host Nate Bargatze, right, and Bowen Yang appear in an opening sketch at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Then the host introduced his much publicized, one would say quintessentially Bargatzean, gimmick. To keep acceptance speeches short, he would donate $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America; $1,000 per second would be deducted for anyone going over the allotted 45 seconds. Money would be added to the pot for anyone running short. (J.B. Smoove, a former Boys Club member, was a sort of co-sponsor, in the audience with a young boy and girl.) This efficiency made professional sense, though it had the potential to put a lid on what is usually the most interesting, unruly, moving, unpredictable part of the show. (If anyone had thought for a second, it also spelled trouble: Try talking for what you imagine is 45 seconds. You will be wrong.)

As it happened, the state of the world was addressed, sidelong and directly. Presenter Julianne Nicholson said of living in a post-apocalyptic bunker in “Paradise,” “compared to headlines that’s positively feel-good TV.” Jeff Hiller, winning supporting actor in a comedy series for “Somebody Somewhere,” thanked the Duplass brothers “for writing a show of connection and love in this time when compassion is seen as a weakness.” “Last Week Tonight” senior writer Daniel O’Brien dedicated their second award to “all writers of political comedy while that is still a type of show that is allowed to exist.” And in a generational echo of their “Hacks” characters, fourth-time winner Jean Smart (who has won seven Emmys overall) ended her acceptance speech saying, “Let’s be good to each other, just be good to each other,” while co-star and first-time winner Hannah Einbinder, finished with, “I just want to say: Go Birds, f— ICE, and free Palestine.” Going way over the 45-second limit, she promised to pay the difference on the tote board.

Hannah Einbinder accepts the award for supporting actress in a comedy series for “Hacks” during the show at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

After Einbeinder, the most direct acknowledgment of current bad events came from Academy Chair and CEO Cris Abrego, speaking of the Governors Award given the week before to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. In a highly quotable speech, he noted how “Congress had voted to defund it and silence yet another cultural institution.” He continued, “In a time when division dominates the headlines, storytelling still has the power to unite us … In times of cultural regression [it reminds] us what’s at stake and what can still be achieved,” and he rattled off a number of much loved shows that challenged the status quo. “In a moment like this, neutrality is not enough. … Culture does not come from the top down, it rises from the bottom up. … Let’s make sure that culture is not a platform for the privileged but a public good for all.” The stars in the audience nodded approvingly.

There were also some pure delights among the bedrock of desultory scripted banter and unimpressive tributes to old shows (“Law & Order: SUV,” “The Golden Girls”). Reunited “Everybody Loves Raymond” co-stars Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, presenting the award for comedy series, recaptured the essence of their television brotherhood. Jennifer Coolidge, presenting the award for lead supporting actress in a comedy, sounded like she’d walked in from a Christopher Guest film. “Between us, I was actually hoping to be nominated for you tonight for my work on this season of ‘The Pitt.’ I played a horny grandmother having a colonoscopy during a power outage and I had to play a lot of levels. I even had to do my own prep.” She went on, after a while, to tell the nominees that winning “is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s really not… I thought I had gotten really close with my fellow nominees especially after I won but I’m pretty sure they removed me from the group chat.”

The inevitable losses incurred by Bargatze’s charity gimmick provided a sort of running joke at the host’s expense, which he managed quite well, while some winners made a game of trying to put money back on the board. But the longer it went on, the more pressure it put on the winners to be short. Eventually, the show found its natural level, as winners said what they needed to, or much of it, and the count dropped tens of thousands of dollars past zero. For everyone but the bean counters, the least important thing about an awards show is it running on time; in any case, it was only a few minutes over.

And, as one might have expected, Bargatze — who made it through the three hours in a way that served the event and his own down-home ethos — paid the originally promised $100,000 and added a $250,000 tip.

In “Am I Roxie?,” a world premiere one-woman-show at the Geffen Playhouse, Roxana Ortega, a working actress and alum of the Groundlings Theatre’s Sunday Company, revisits the period in her life when she was the caregiver for her mother, whose memory was unraveling.

When Ortega’s father died of a sudden heart attack outside the post office, she was unprepared for the consequences. He had been protecting the family from her mother’s decline.

An immigrant from Peru who had relinquished her dreams of acting to raise a family, Carmen had a special bond with Ortega. When little Roxana was growing up in Fullerton, her mother would improvise operas while fixing breakfast. Together, they dreamed theatrical dreams.

Carmen has many sisters — “Picture the Housewives of Beverly Hills, but in Canoga Park” — but none were able to take her in. Ortega’s siblings, married with children, were similarly unable.

Not having kids of her own deprived Ortega of the one excuse her family would have recognized. Yet she still wanted to have kids, though not before she found the right husband and made some headway in a career marked by small triumphs, such as booking commercials and webisodes. Was she really going to put her life on hold for a few years?

Finding a painful compromise, she decides to move her mother to an assisted-living facility near her in L.A. Taking this step requires her to go to war with her “inner Latina critic,” who reminds her of the code of her blood: “We take care of our own.” She adds an expletive to the end of this pronouncement, but no emphasis is needed for a daughter who has already indicted herself for selfishness, the one unpardonable sin for a Latina.

“Am I Roxie?,” performed by Ortega with unflagging ebullience in an athletic-wear jumpsuit designed for comfort rather than style, brings to the exhausting, guilt-inducing grind of eldercare her own cultural spin. The subject is relatable, as lifespans have extended while health insurance only seems to contract. Ortega is an agreeable guide through the thicket of problems, such as choosing between senior facilities that resemble “sad Marriotts” or “sad La Quinta Inns.”

The show is more of a personal essay composed for the stage than a deeply imagined performance work. Ortega’s approach is friendly and wryly conversational. She’s bearing witness to a human dilemma our culture would prefer to keep under wraps, but Ortega might just as easily be doing an audio essay or podcast. The one character who comes vividly to life is her own.

There’s a rich tradition of performance artists bringing difficult personal stories to public light. “Am I Roxie?” seems disconnected from the work of Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin and Marga Gomez. Soloists who can populate the stage with uncurtailed ambition.

Thematically, “Am I Roxie?” is structured around the “Circle of Life” song from “The Lion King.” Ortega knows this reference is corny, but it’s also inescapably apt. The person who gave her life now needs her help as she nears the end.

Roxana Ortega in “Am I Roxie?” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Birth and death weigh heavy on Ortega’s mind, as she ponders her own lifespan, the diminishing window for motherhood and the confused and sometimes angry helplessness of Carmen, who comes to believe that her daughter is her sister. Eventually, Carmen will wonder if she herself is Roxie, an existential dilemma that Ortega refuses to understand as a mere symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.

She’s reluctant at the start to name her mother’s condition. How can she reduce a loved one to a medical diagnosis? Even at Carmen’s most exasperating, she could still surprise Ortega with a simple, poignant question: “How are you doing in your life, Roxie?”

Ortega begins to understand that, though her mother has been transformed, she can still connect with her if she accepts her as she is. By speaking to her mother in the nonsense language she falls into and by playing games of pretend as if they were back in her childhood home, Ortega reaches her mother, if only for fleeting moments.

The production, directed by Bernardo Cubría, seems to have adopted a medical oath of first doing no harm. A set piece is every now and again mechanically (and somewhat quizzically) moved in or out, and there are projections offering illustrations of Fullerton and Ortega’s mental health adventure scaling the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

But “Am I Roxie?” doesn’t depend on scenic frills. Ortega is the show — not just her story but her rapport with the theatergoers, with whom she confides as if to old friends. She shares her fears that she might have occasionally failed her mother, but this confession is just another example of her generous humanity.

’

The cultural legacy of the 1984 rock-mock-doc “This Is Spinal Tap” is of sufficient amplitude that, to give the band’s guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) his knob-twiddling due, it’s gone way past 11.

Perennially quotable, ad-libbed to Brit-accented perfection by co-creators Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer and finessed into an iconic spoof by director Rob Reiner, “Spinal Tap” was born. The movie both ridiculed (and, slyly, furthered the cause for) the metal world’s idiotic excesses, but also an industry’s love of a satisfying comeback saga.

When your fake movie becomes gospel truth to admiring music legends and a pretend forgotten band goes on to play Wembley in real life, the fine line between clever and stupid (again, so quotable) suddenly looks like a rarefied space for a sequel to exploit.

Yet when the key comic minds behind that singular sendup of past-prime glory-seekers aim to rekindle their magic, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” leaves one thinking some classics are better left in their original, endlessly re-playable states.

Not that the sight, 40 years on, of the sweetly clueless Tufnel, McKean’s prickly frontman David St. Hubbins and Shearer’s man-of-few-blurts Derek Smalls reuniting for one last concert won’t trigger a low-wattage 83-minute-long smile. But the concept of Tap being revered (by legend cameos Paul McCartney and Elton John, no less) saps the comedy of outsider tension, making for something closer to a feature-length outtake reel than a fresh take on clownish notoriety.

There’s agreeable silliness early on in seeing where the trio has landed in their solo lives, from acknowledged retail dreamer Nigel’s cheese-and-guitar shop to the fringes of the recording world, where California-transplanted David finds himself composing phone-hold music. In these moments, you get a glimpse of the special sauce of personality delusion that Guest, as a director, turned into a mini-genre (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind”). But when dead Tap manager Ian Faith’s daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman), having inherited daddy’s contract, forces the members to gather in New Orleans for an arena show, the whole thing loses an essential oddball energy, trying to coast on a masterpiece’s fumes.

Gag encores are pitfalls. The famous drummer mortality problem is a case in point, wearing out its understandable reviving with star cameos (Questlove, Lars Ulrich) and a lackluster tryout montage. Then, after the hiring of an energetic young replacement (Valerie Franco), a humor opportunity is missed when we wonder why she isn’t pushing back on having to play songs like “Bitch School.” Even the band’s second chance at a Stonehenge showstopper is more like a joke in name only.

The three leads can still, when given room, generate an anything-can-happen vibe, even if the improvisatory pearls are in short supply. But there are quite a few instances when the promise of comedic friction is undercooked or ignored and the new strains of hinted lunacy (as when Guest regulars John Michael Higgins and Don Lake show up) never quite soar.

The funniest addition, because it feels genuinely pointed about the milieu, is Chris Addison as the band’s aggressive promoter Simon, who prides himself on being impervious to enjoying music, and tells our septuagenarian rockers that for posterity’s sake, ideally, two of them should die during the show. Thankfully, nothing in “Spinal Tap II” will kill off the original’s legacy. It’s just a nostalgia lap you wish had more 11.

Our writer discovered that there’s plenty to do at this spectacular Bahamas resort, a destination that’s been visited by celebrities and royalty alike

If you’re a James Bond fan, Paradise Island in the Bahamas should definitely be on your travel wish list — it was a location in 1965’s Thunderball starring Sean Connery and Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale, where he famously emerged from the sea in his swimming trunks. It’s also home to the ocean-themed Atlantis resort, a stunning waterscape, casino and hotel that has been visited by the likes of Beyoncé, Cameron Diaz and Taylor Swift, as well as the Prince and Princess of Wales.

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The rooms at Atlantis Paradise Island

After landing at Lynden Pindling International Airport, it’s a 30-minute drive along the coast of New Providence island to the Sir Sidney Poitier Bridge that takes you to Paradise Island.

Atlantis Paradise Island has more than 3,800 rooms spread over five hotels, each of which offers a different experience. The Cove, where Prince William and Kate stayed in the penthouse suite in 2022, is an all-suite, ultra- modern and achingly chic five-star tower that has a separate pool and beach for its residents.

There’s also The Reef, Harborside Resort and family-oriented The Coral, but we stayed at The Royal, the iconic pink-coloured pair of buildings closest to the casino, pools, water park and the restaurant and shopping area known as Marina Village. Our 15th-floor room was an oasis of calm, with a balcony and a view of the sea, palm trees and pools.

Atlantis’s Aquaventure water park

The jewel in the Atlantis crown has to be the Aquaventure water park and the surrounding marine life exhibits. We spent hours wandering through the caverns of the Dig, a themed aquarium featuring coral, jellyfish and tropical fish, and watching the sharks swimming above the Predator Tunnel. There’s also a dolphin habitat and a turtle hatching programme, part of Atlantis’s Blue Project to protect marine life.

Thrill-seekers will love the eight slides at the water park, entry to which is free for hotel guests. The Rapids River ride was a blast as we navigated the waters around the tropical gardens while trying not to fall out of inflatable tubes, while the Serpent Slide sent me on a corkscrew descent in the dark before taking me through a lagoon as bemused sharks swam past.

Those feeling extra brave can try out slides with names like The Abyss and The Surge, and there are also gentler options for younger kids, as well as 14 swimming pools.

The grounds include walking paths, a rope bridge and six beaches, where we dipped our toes in the clear warm water and watched the sun set behind a lone pine tree on the sand – the location for many a marriage proposal.

The food at Atlantis Paradise Island

There’s something for everyone at Atlantis, from foodies to fussy kids, but eating here isn’t cheap. The resort features celebrity chef restaurants including Fish by José Andrés, Nobu (William and Kate had sushi delivered to their suite from here) and Paranza by Michael White, but there are some cheaper options for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

As Atlantis is extremely popular with Americans (it’s less than an hour’s flight from Miami), the portions are American-sized at all of the 40-plus snack bars, cafés and restaurants dotted around the resort.

Most days we skipped lunch as we were still full from our breakfast from grab-and-go café Plato’s. In the evening, we enjoyed jerk chicken with fried plantains at Bahamian restaurant Bimini Road, indulged in delicious rib eye steaks at Seafire Steakhouse, and visited the prettiest Shake Shack you’ll ever see, with windows looking into the aquarium so you can watch the fish go by while you eat your cheeseburgers and fries.

Best of all, however, was Carmine’s, a budget-friendly Italian restaurant that serves food ‘family size’, with each dish suitable for three to four people to share. The friendly staff reassure newcomers that one plate of spaghetti bolognese really will feed their whole party (trust me, it will).

What to do in the Bahamas

If you can drag yourself away from Atlantis, it’s worth taking a quick trip by taxi over the bridge from Paradise Island to Nassau. Here, there’s plenty to explore, including 18th-century Fort Fincastle, which was built to protect the town from pirates and can be accessed from Queen’s Staircase, a walkway of 66 limestone steps named after Queen Victoria.

You’ll also find Ardastra Gardens – a small zoo and conservation centre that’s home to the national bird of the Bahamas, the flamingo. Then, head to the busy straw market and port, where you can sit and marvel at the huge cruise ships that dock for the day or take your own boat trip to Rose Island, where you can swim with the pigs.

How much does it cost to stay at Atlantis Paradise Island Bahamas?

Rooms at Atlantis Paradise Island’s The Coral start from approx £190 per night for a room that sleeps up to four adults. A luxury suite in The Cove costs from approx £340 per night. Prices vary depending on the time of year – November to March is the most expensive; June to late October tends to be cheaper. Follow Atlantis Paradise Island Bahamas on social media for the latest offers.

For other hotels on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, check out Expedia and Booking.com’s selections.