review

The California Supreme Court sided with environmental groups in a Thursday ruling, saying that state lawyers were wrong in their claim that the Public Utilities Commission’s decision to slash rooftop solar incentives could not be challenged.

The unanimous decision sends the case brought by the three groups back to the appeals court.

The groups argue the utilities commission violated state law in 2022 when it cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending their unused power to the electric grid by as much as 80%. The rules apply to Californians installing the panels after April 14, 2023.

The Supreme Court justices said the appeals court erred in January 2024 when it ruled against the environmental groups. In that decision, the appeals court said that courts must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters.

“This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission’s work,” the appeals court had concluded then in its opinion.

The environmental groups argued the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission’s decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies.

“The California Supreme Court has ruled in our favor that the CPUC is not above the law,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, after Thursday’s decision was published. The other groups filing the case are the Center for Biological Diversity and The Protect Our Communities Foundation.

The utilities commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling.

More than 2 million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal, set by a 2018 law, of using only carbon-free energy by 2045.

The utilities commission has said that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in “a cost shift” of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This has raised electric bills, especially hurting low-income electric customers, the commission says.

The credits for energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid had been valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commission has voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested.

The state’s three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — have sided with commission in the case.

The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid.

For decades, the utilities have worked to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities’ sale of electricity.

Tuesday night, Gustavo Dudamel was back at the Hollywood Bowl. This summer is the 20th anniversary of his U.S. debut — at 24 years old — conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and becoming irrepressibly besotted with the amphitheater.

He walked on stage, now the proud paterfamilias with greying hair and a broad welcoming smile on his face as he surveyed the nearly full house. The weather was fine. The orchestra, as so very few orchestras ever do, looked happy.

For Dudamel, his single homecoming week this Bowl season began Monday evening conducting his beloved Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as part of the annual YOLA National Festival, which brings kids from around the country to the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. But it is also a bittersweet week. Travel issues (no one will say exactly what, but we can easily guess) have meant the cancellation of his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela‘s trip to the Bowl next week. Dudamel will also be forced to remain behind with them in Caracas.

After 20 years, Dudamel clearly knows what works at the Bowl, but he also likes to push the envelope as with Tuesday’s savvy blend of Duke Ellington and jazzy Ravel. The soloist was Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose recent recording of Ravel’s complete solo piano works along with his two concertos, has been one of the most popular releases celebrating the Ravel year (March 7 was the 150^th anniversary of the French composer’s birth).

Ellington and Ravel were certainly aware of each other. When Ravel visited New York in 1928, he heard the 29-year-old Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club, although his attention on the trip was more drawn to Gershwin. Ellington knew and admired Ravel, and Billy Strayhorn, who was responsible for much of Ellington’s music, was strongly drawn to Ravel’s harmony and use of instrumental color.

On his return to Paris, Ravel wrote his two piano concertos, the first for the left hand alone, and jazz influences were strong. Cho played both concertos, which were framed by the symphonic tone poems “Harlem” and “Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington called tone parallels.

There has been no shortage of Ravel concerto performance of late — or ever — but Ellington is another matter. Although the pianist, composer and band leader was very much on the radar of the classical world — “Harlem” was originally intended for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony; Leopold Stokowski attended the Carnegie Hall premiere of “Black, Brown and Beige,” as did Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Frank Sinatra — Ellington never played the crossover game. The NBC “Harlem” never panned out and became a big-band score. Ever practical, Ellington, who composed mostly in wee hours after gigs, always wrote for the occasion and the players. He tended to leave orchestration to others, more concerned with highlighting the fabulous improvising soloists in his band.

The scores, moreover, were gatherings, developments and riffs on various existing songs. “Harlem” is an acoustical enrapturement of the legendary Harlem Renaissance and one of the great symphonic portraits of a place in the repertory. “Black, Brown and Beige” is an ambitious acoustical unfolding of the American Black narrative, from African work songs to spiritual exaltation with “Come Sunday” (sung by Mahalia Jackson at the premiere) to aspects of Black life, in war and peace, up to the Harlem Renaissance.

Both works are best known today, if nonetheless seldom heard, in the conventional but effective orchestrations by Maurice Peress and are what Dudamel relies on. The version of “Black, Brown and Beige” reduces it from 45 to 18 too-short minutes.

The primary reason for these scores’ neglect is that orchestras can’t swing. The exception is the L.A. Phil. With Dudamel’s surprising success of taking the L.A. Phil to Coachella, there now seems nothing it can’t do.

The time has come to commission more experimental and more timely arrangements. But even these Peress arrangements, blasted through the Bowl‘s sound system and with the orchestra bolstered by a jazz saxophone section, jazz drummer and other jazz-inclined players, caught the essence of one of America’s greatest composers.

Ravel fared less well. The left-hand concerto has dark mysteries hard to transmit over so many acres and video close-ups of two-armed pianists trying to keep the right hand out of the way can be disconcerting. This summer, in fact, unmusical jumpy video is at all times disconcerting.

Ravel’s jazzier, sunnier G-Major concerto is a winner everywhere. But for all Cho’s acclaim in Ravel, he played with sturdy authority. Four years ago, joining Dudamel at an L.A. Phil gala in Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cho brought refined freshness to Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. In Ravel at the Bowl, amplification strongly accentuated his polished technique, gleaming tone and meticulous rhythms, leaving it up to Dudamel and a joyous, eager orchestra to exult in the Ravel that Ellington helped make swing.

Burrows, who represented Northern Ireland at the 2022 Euros, said she was “relieved and appreciative” that Cliftonville’s challenge was successful.

“The original sanction was not only going to affect my ability to play the sport I love, but it also took a significant toll on my mental and social well-being,” added the former Blackburn and Linfield player.

“The stress of being accused of something I knew I didn’t do was incredibly emotionally difficult, and it placed strain on my relationships both on and off the pitch.

“I’m proud to represent both Cliftonville and Northern Ireland, and I’ve always tried to conduct myself with professionalism and respect for the game.

“I’m thankful the challenge process acknowledged the full context of the incident, and I now look forward to moving on and continuing to give everything for my club and country.”

Young adult comedies are best when the misery of high school is paired with other extreme types of terror — a plane crash, a supernatural mystery, vampires. “Wednesday,” Netflix’s Addams Family series, did just that and more when it premiered in 2022, combining sardonic wit, smart casting and murder in a beautifully macabre setting influenced by producer and director Tim Burton. Jenna Ortega stars as the Addams’ dark-hearted daughter. Her deadpan delivery and zombie prom dance solidified “Wednesday” as one of the year’s best and liveliest funerary comedies.

The second season of “Wednesday,” Part 1 of which debuts Wednesday followed by Part 2 on Sept. 3, finds the show’s namesake back at Nevermore Academy, where she’s faced with challenges familiar to last season. She must navigate the idiocy of her high school peers while solving a metaphysical murder mystery.

But there’s a new twist that threatens to undermine the unflappable protagonist, and it’s a teenager’s worst nightmare — even for a girl who enjoys night terrors. Wednesday’s weird family is headed to school with her. Brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) is a Nevermore freshman and her parents Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán) are helping with fundraising and such. Oh the horror.

Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams “dance dance dances with her hands, hands, hands” in “Wednesday” Season 1.

(Netflix)

Season 2 follows many of the same formulas, replete with eviscerating comebacks from Daddy’s Little Viper. When her new high school principal, Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi), asks if she’d like a Nevermore Academy spirit sticker, she responds, “Only if you have one that says ‘Do Not Resuscitate.’” And when describing her underachieving brother’s shortcomings, she says, “He’s got the brains of a dung beetle and the ambitions of a French bureaucrat.”

But it’s impossible to recapture the magic of the first season, and “Wednesday” Season 2 isn’t quite as crisp or surprising. In the first four episodes made available for review, Wednesday’s zingers aren’t as wickedly sharp as they once were. And because we know she’s going to be annoyed by her classmates, such as perky werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers), the dynamic is not as morbidly charming.

The bond between Addams family members, however, is more deeply explored and their dysfunctional interactions add a new layer of contemptuous humor to the mix. The relationship between Wednesday and Morticia is strained, and not just due to the usual disgust teen daughters have toward their mothers. “When do I get to read your novel?” asks Morticia of her daughter’s work in progress, “Viper de la Muerte.” Wednesday’s inner voice answers, “When the sun explodes and the Earth is consumed in a molten apocalypse.” Her outside voice? “Soon, Mother. Soon.”

Morticia is worried about Wednesday’s increasing use of her psychic powers because similar abilities drove another family member mad. Her daughter is showing troubling signs such as black tears streaming from her eyes each time she has a psychic episode — though it’s a good look, especially for those contemplating their next Halloween costume.

We thankfully see a lot more of eccentric Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen owns this role) as he helps Wednesday solve her latest case, sometimes using the benefit of his telekinetic powers. Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday in the 1991 film, is also back. The deranged villain from Season 1 is now a deranged inmate.

Welcome new additions include Grandmama Hester Frump (played by Joanna Lumley of “Absolutely Fabulous”), Morticia’s immaculately coiffed mother and wealthy mogul who owns Frump Mortuaries. She’s cold, conniving and happy to cause a deeper rift between her granddaughter and daughter. And in a perfect casting move, Christopher Lloyd, who played Fester in the film, appears as a disembodied head in a jar who teaches at the academy.

Thing, the lone hand played by Romanian magician Victor Dorobantu, perhaps has the most screen time of anyone. Season 2 opens with the stitched-up appendage beating the hell out of a serial killer. It’s at once satisfying and stupidly hilarious.

As for the plot, it’s much the same as last season. There’s another mystery to solve, but this time it involves killer surveillance crows, a hooded stalker and at least a few visits to an insane asylum. There’s also a walking dead character added to the mix, so expect gore in the form of goo, brains and bugs.

But it’s really the performances, casting and artistic flourishes that make “Wednesday” a ghoulish delight. A short ghost story about a boy with a clockwork heart buried under the Skull Tree is told via Burton claymation, in black-and-white, in the spirit of “Frankenweenie.” It’s beautiful, sweet and sorrow-filled. “Wednesday” isn’t what it was and that’s OK. It still works as spooky comedy about a girl and her severed hand.

For centuries, mythology looked to gods to explain a disquieting world. But in the new documentary “Folktales,” from “Jesus Camp” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, which follows a trio of jumbled Scandinavian teens to a remote Norwegian school that builds character in the snowy wild, the answer to life may just lie in what “god” spells backward.

In other words, yes, let’s go to the dogs: sled dogs, specifically, whose personalities, purpose and compatibility are the secret sauce to a lesson plan that seeks to get kids out of their heads and into a stronger sense of self. The beautiful Alaskan and Siberian huskies that animate the dog-sledding instruction at Norway’s Pasvik Folk High School are what help lift this handsomely photographed film above the usual heart warmer.

Ewing and Grady are no stranger to this scenario, having observed at-risk Baltimore youth striving for stability (“The Boys of Baraka”) and unhappy Hasidic Jews attempting to remove themselves from all they’ve ever known (“One of Us”). The situation is less sociologically dire in “Folktales,” but it isn’t any less compelling as a subject or less worthy of empathetic attention, especially when the stage for potential transformation is as rapturous as the birthplace of Vikings.

Pasvik is 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which means self-reliance isn’t optional and knitting carries more practical weight than learning a math formula. As gap-year institutions dedicated to nurturing the transition to adulthood, folk schools have roots going back to the 19th century. Pasvik sees survival training as unlocking potential in teens too devoted to their phone screens. As convivial dog-sledding teacher Iselin puts it to the students, she wants to “wake up your Stone Age brains.”

For anxious, bubbly 19-year-old Hege, who lost her father and struggles with image issues, unplugging is tough at first. But she responds to its benefits, especially when entrusted with the care of Odin, a gorgeous, lovable canine with an expressive howl. Socially awkward Bjorn wants to stop harboring sad thoughts and second-guessing his nerdiness. Nothing like a majestic creature who rewards your undivided attention, then, to refocus one’s energies. When the students are tasked with spending two nights in the forest alone with just their assigned huskies and camping acumen, their struggles give way to a turning point, what another kindhearted instructor describes as the special inner peace that comes with just “a fire, a dog and a starry sky.”

You also gather that Ewing and Grady may have been seeking some inspiration themselves. Hence, some arty montages of the icy wilderness (including some woo-woo yarn-and-tree symbolism) and an ambiance closer to warm spotlight than objective inquiry.

That makes “Folktales” decidedly more powdery than densely packed — it’s all ruddy cheeks, slo-mo camaraderie and the healing power of steering a dog sled through breathtaking terrain. It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning. It’s hard to say whether negative-minded high school dropout Romain will wind up on the other side of what troubles him. But we see how happy he is making friends and catching a glimpse of moose in the wild. It’s a simple message, but “Folktales” sells it: Nurture via nature.

We know from headlines that small-scale technologies such as drones have transformed war, most urgently affecting Ukraine’s ability to stay in a bruising battle for its existence against Russia. But it’s done the same for covering war too, especially the kind of fleet, up-close dispatch of which we can now say Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov is a master.

The Associated Press correspondent’s follow-up to his harrowing, Oscar-winning “20 Days in Mariupol,” which rendered the first weeks of Russia’s invasion inside a city under siege, is another intimate perspective on his country’s devastation. But this time it’s from the frontlines of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, specifically one brigade’s nightmarish trek to liberate a Russian-occupied town. In its heart-stopping intimacy — courtesy of helmet-cams, drones and the foxhole connection between citizen soldier and countryman journalist — “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a war chronicle like no other.

Right away, Chernov introduces us to war’s chaos with bodycam footage from a Ukrainian soldier named Piro. It’s a dugout POV capturing how a lull marked by jokes and cigarettes can quickly become enemy fire, screaming and artillery shells flying. A retreat is abandoned when the platoon’s armored carrier gets stuck. In the ensuing scramble, comrades are hit and we hear a resigned, “That’s it for me.” Suddenly this view feels less like one from a trench but a grave.

No wonder Chernov’s measured narration sounds bleaker. His speculative dread from “Mariupol” has been replaced by a fact-driven weariness. He and AP colleague Alex Babenko press on, embedding themselves in a battalion tasked with a one-mile push to retake the town of Andriivka near a Russian stronghold. The path, however, is a thin ribbon of forest hiding Russians in trenches, fortified on each side by open minefields.

Also, the designation “forest” seems generous: The gnarled and stripped trees look broken, suggesting an open wasteland instead of a battleground that could provide cover. They’ve clearly already seen plenty of destruction, and by the end of the film, they’ll have seen more. Chernov tells us that one soldier described this unrecognizable homeland to him as like “landing on a planet where everything is trying to kill you.”

The first-person footage as the group advances is breathless and dense with gunfire, yelling and the sense that each inch will be hard-won on the way to planting that Ukrainian flag in Andriivka, which, from drone shots, already looks decimated. (The film is broken into chapters indicating meters gained.) “I came to fight, not to serve,” says this brigade’s war dog of a leader, a former warehouse worker named Fedya who at one point is shot but makes his way back to the mission after being evacuated for treatment.

Still, during long foxhole waits, when the only visible smoke is from a cigarette, Chernov’s gentle off-camera queries to Fedya’s men (ranging from the hopelessly young to a 40-something new grandfather) elicit touching optimism for a return to normal life: a shower, a job, friendly rivalries over trivial matters, the chance to smoke less, to fix a toilet back home, to rebuild. Then Chernov’s voiceover comes in for the softly spoken hammer-blow peek into the future: which of these guys will die in later battles or perhaps never be found. This is gutting stuff.

There’s never been as immersive a war documentary as “2000 Meters in Andriivka,” cleaving as it does to the swings between peril and blessed boredom, mixing overhead shots (including a suicide drone’s vantage) and underground views like a dystopian saga. War is hell, but Ukraine’s survival is paramount. The senselessness, however, seems a constant. “Why are you here?” a Ukrainian soldier barks at a captured Russian, who mutters back, “I don’t know why we’re here.”

THE cordless vacuum revolution is in full swing, and Shark’s IZ202UKT has swaggered onto the scene promising to banish dust bunnies and pet hair with ease and style.

I’ve put the Shark IZ202UKT to the test to see if it’s all flash and no substance, or if it’s the sleek domestic godsend we’ve been praying for.

Shark IZ202UKT Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, £279.99 from Amazon

Pros:

• 40-minute battery life
• Good-sized dustbin (0.7L)
• Quiet on hard floors
• Sleek and premium design
• Lights that highlight missed dirt
• Powerful boost trigger
• Compact to store
• Easy to use
• Anti-hair wrap technology

Cons

• Heavier than other models
• Can struggle in tight corners with the main attachment

Rating: 8.5/10

How I tested

Shark IZ202UKT Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, £279.99 from Amazon

I tested the Shark cordless vacuum out for two months on long- and short-pile carpets and three types of hard floors: laminate, vinyl and engineered wood.

During the testing period, I used each of the attachments and tested the battery by seeing how long it took to run down from a full charge using the normal power (39 minutes) and boost functions (seven and a half minutes).

I used it as my only vacuum during this period to see how well it fares in everyday life, including on stairs and in my car.

I took into consideration the design, ease of use and its innovative functions like the flexology, anti-hair wrap technology and LED headlights.

Shark IZ202UKT review: The Nitty Gritty

First impressions

Shark IZ202UKT Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, £279.99 from Amazon

Pulling the Shark IZ202UKT out of its box, I could immediately tell it was a solid, well-constructed bit of kit.

It came with four attachments (main anti-hair wrap, upholstery, pet and crevice tools), and assembling the vacuum was a breeze, a testament to Shark’s genuinely logical design.

Everything clicked satisfyingly into place, no head-scratching required.

After charging the vacuum, it took seconds to assemble it before I was ready to tackle the dust bunnies that had taken up residence on my floors.

Does it deliver?

Shark IZ202UKT Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, £279.99 from Amazon

One of the first things I noticed about the Shark is how quiet it is in hard floor mode.

It glides effortlessly across laminate, vinyl and wood, sucking up everything from fine dust to larger debris without a fuss.

I could definitely hear and feel the difference in the power when I switched to carpet mode, and then hear it level up again when I squeezed the trigger for max power.

The max power setting is really effective at sucking up those stubborn bits of fluff and pet hair ingrained in the carpet.

Battery life

The Achilles’ heel of many cordless vacuums is battery life. I’ve had vacuums in the past that would conk out halfway through my vacuuming session, leaving me with a half-clean house.

This is not an issue I experienced with the Shark IZ202UKT.

I used it in multiple rooms, switching between hard floor and carpet modes, and I managed to vacuum the entire house with battery still left over.

Shark claims up to 40 minutes of run time, and during my tests, it consistently delivered between 37-40 minutes, on standard power settings.

When I tested it using Max power only, it lasted seven and a half minutes, which I think is relatively impressive.

If used on the standard settings with a few bursts of max power when needed, I’m optimistic most people will be able to tackle a substantial portion of their home, if not the whole thing, without needing to pause for a recharge.

If you have a larger home, you could opt to purchase a spare battery to swap out when needed.

Dustbin capacity, Flexology wand and LED lights

Another unsung hero of the IZ202UKT is its nice big bin — I was able to vacuum most of the house before needing to empty it.

This might sound like a small thing, but anyone whose vacuum forces them to constantly empty a tiny dustbin will appreciate the sheer convenience of this.

The bin is also quick, easy and mess-free to empty.

Shark has designed something called the Flexology wand, which is a very handy feature for multiple reasons.

With a simple press of a button, the wand bends in half, making it super easy to vacuum under furniture, beds, and sofas without having to contort yourself or move heavy items.

It’s also ideal for compact storage as it more than halves the height of the vacuum, making it easy to tuck into cupboards.

Another feature I really liked, and one you likely won’t realise you need until you have it, is the integrated LED lights.

They illuminate dust, crumbs, and pet hair that you would otherwise completely miss, especially under furniture, in dimly lit corners, or even just in a room with poor natural light.

This is also a feature my colleague Aaron raved about in his Dyson V15 Detect review.

Downsides

In terms of cons, there are two things I noticed which are worth bearing in mind.

The cordless vacuum cleaner weighs 5.16kg, which may not sound like a lot, but when you’re vacuuming for 40 minutes straight, you’ll likely feel your arm start to ache.

I was especially aware of the added weight, as my former vacuum (Dyson V8 Animal) weighs less than half the Shark, at 2.54kg.

The other downside is its agility.

The main attachment is quite large, and I noticed that it struggles to get right into the corners, occasionally leaving bits of fluff behind.

Again, I found this especially noticeable compared to the Dyson Animal V8 I was using previously, which is a lot slimmer and more nimble.

It was easily solved by switching to the crevice tool, but it caused a slight inconvenience.

How much is the Shark IZ202UKT vacuum cleaner?

The Shark IZ202UKT Anti Hair Wrap Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner retails in the UK for £350; however, it’s often on sale and has been spotted for as low as £189.

It can currently be found on sale for £189 at Go Electrical, or you can buy a refurbished model for £169 on Shark’s eBay store.

Where to buy the Shark IZ202UKT

Shark IZ202UKT Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, £279.99 from Amazon

You can find the Shark IZ202UKT at a variety of retailers across the UK, both online and in physical stores, including:

Alternatives

There are a few strong contenders in the cordless stick vacuum market that offer similar features to the Shark model.

Dyson V8 Absolute: Although an older model, the Dyson V8 Absolute is often available at a more affordable price point than newer Dysons, and it still offers excellent suction and the premium Dyson build quality.

It’s lighter than the Shark IZ202UKT, which might appeal if arm ache is a concern. However, it lacks the Flexology wand and automatic hair detangling of the Shark.

It’s currently priced around £250, £100 less than the RRP of the Shark.

Vax Blade 4 Classic Plus Cordless Vacuum Cleaner: This model is frequently praised for being an affordable all-rounder.

It offers impressive pick-up capabilities on various floor types and comes with a good range of tools, making it a solid choice for everyday cleaning.

You can often find it for between £140 and £230.

Shark PowerPro Pet Cordless Stick Vacuum: If you’re looking for an alternative within the Shark family, then the PowerPro Pet is a great option.

It has a lot of the same features with a slightly longer run time than the IZ202UKT (50 mins), but is slightly heavier at 5.68kg (vs 5.13kg).

It can be found for around the same price point (£190-280), too.

Dyson V12 Detect: For a bit more money, you could get the Dyson V12 Detect, which has 60 minutes of battery life, hair detangling, and a laser which illuminates invisible dust.

It’s a lot lighter than the Shark but does have a smaller bin.

The RRP is £499.99, but it’s currently on sale for £380. Read our Dyson V15 Detect review here.

A slow-paced, fact-based period drama of war and love in precolonial Hawai’i, “Chief of War,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, presents co-creator and star Jason Momoa as the late-18th century warrior Ka’iana in a story set at the intersection of the island kingdoms and the arrival of European colonists. It’s clearly a passion project, and like many passion projects, it can go overboard at times, grow overstuffed, not to say oversolemn — though solemnity, to be sure, is appropriate to the history. But the passion shows through, and the stuff is interesting — nothing you see everyday, for sure.

Hawaii, of course, was a cultural touchstone, an obsession among continental Americans, long before it became the 50th state. Ukuleles. Steel guitars. Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii” and “Paradise, Hawaiian Style,” not to mention “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite.” The Brady Bunch traveled there, and so did Dennis the Menace in a comic book I once owned. “Magnum P.I.,” “Hawaii Five-0,” “The White Lotus,” Season 1. Hawaiian Punch (created 1934), which mixed orange, pineapple, passion fruit, guava and papaya flavors, and is still available at a store near you in at least 14 flavors. Tiki bars. Suburban luaus. Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, where the birds sing words and the flowers croon, presented by Dole. It goes on and on.

Momoa, who was born in Honolulu, raised in Iowa and returned to the islands for college, slipped into show business by way of “Baywatch Hawaii,” followed by the Oahu-set hotel drama “North Shore.” He played an alien in four seasons of “Stargate Atlantis,” Conan the Barbarian, Aquaman, of course, and twice hosted “Saturday Night Live.” (And recently Ozzy Osbourne’s swan song concert “Back to the Beginning.”) It’s not surprising that he’d want to stretch a little, to step away from genre projects, and represent the roots of his people in a respectful manner. One would call “Chief of War” well-researched, even if one was not at all aware of how much research was done. The ordinary viewer may need to take notes to keep things straight; titles notwithstanding, I wasn’t always certain what island we were on, especially since characters might be living on or aligned with another, and because within an island, various “districts” might be at war, intramurally, as it were. (I did take notes, and I’m still a little confused as to exactly what some of them were after.)

A comparison to “Shogun” is as good as inevitable, given the subtitled dialogue — most of the series is performed in Hawaiian — the encounters with outsiders, the ambitious monarchs and the warring factions. In the latter respects, the series also resembles “Game of Thrones,” where Momoa spent two seasons as chieftain Khal Drogo. And its opening might make you think of “The Lord of the Rings,” as a woman’s voice sets the story (a prophesied king will unite the endless, ending “a cycle of endless war”), introducing the island kingdoms of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, Maui and O’ahu, “separated by cunning chiefs and powerful gods.”

We’re introduced to Ka’iana, a Maui war chief who has left that island, and more to the point, deserted its army, to live a peaceful life on Kaua’i with his two brothers Nahi’ (Siua Ikale’o) and Namake (Te Kohe Tuhaka) and significant others Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinepehinga) and Heke (Mainei Kinimaka). On the whole, given what follows, one would call this the superior lifestyle, and I would have been happy just to spend a little time in this world, with its plant-based architecture and fashions and cheeky local children getting into Ka’iana’s stuff. But like a retired gunslinger in a western movie, circumstances will not let him rest. (He will, in fact, sling a gun before the season is out.)

Kaina Makua and Luciane Buchanan also stars in “Chief of War.”

(Nicola Dove/Apple TV+)

“A war chief who runs from war — you are a chief of contradictions,” says Kaʻahumanu (Luciane Buchanan), a young Maui woman Ka’iana meets in a cave while he’s on the run, where she’s lying low from her councilor father (Moses Goods), who means to ship her to Hawai’i to marry her to Kamehameha (Kaina Makua), in charge of the “god of war,” a sort of military good-luck charm whose possession will be a major issue, though Kamehameha’s own inclinations bend toward peace. But with crazy villains like King Kahekili (Temuera Morrison) and Keoua (Cliff Curtis), not to mention some rogue white sailors with their own dreams of conquest, that may have to wait.

A contemporary account describes the real-life Ka’iana as “near 6 feet 5 inches in stature, and the muscular form of his limbs was of a Herculean appearance,” which is basically typecasting for Momoa. In many ways “Chief of War” is another superhero role for him, if a more emotionally busy one. He’s the best fighter by miles, can catch a spear in his head, ride a shark (a drugged shark, but still) and whip out a laser stare calculated to make his enemies quake. But he also must grapple with family business, love stuff and getting people to listen to his better ideas.

Circumstances will lead Ka’iana into the ocean and onto a British sailing ship, where he will travel to Alaska and the Spanish East Indies, learn all about guns, which he regards as a potentially useful invention, and to speak English — John Young (Benjamin Hoetjes) a marooned sailor taken into the community, is teaching it back on Hawai’i, and soon many characters are speaking English, even when it doesn’t make any practical sense. And in a story in which “pale-skin” colonists meet and exploit Indigenous populations, white racism necessarily gets a licking — “They do not see you as people,” says Tony (James Udom), a Black man who befriends Ka’iana on his accidental voyage — including an actual licking.

Injecting a strain of anticipatory feminism, Momoa and his collaborator Thomas Paʻa Sibbett have taken care not only to incorporate women into their testosterone-heavy world (including Sisa Grey as a street-smart Hawai’ian expat), but to give them interesting things to do — Kupuohi “was once a chiefess of war,” Heke wants Nahi’ to teach her how to fight — and wise things to say, e.g., “Men train their whole lives to be warriors but they fear being wrong more than they fear death.” (So true.) There are gay characters, too, presented without comment.

The actors are appealing when they’re meant to be, and very much unappealing when they’re meant to be, but they’re all excellent (including the nonprofessional Makua). The pacing can be pokey — elegiac if you prefer — between the big action scenes, which can be disturbingly violent. (It can also be very violent when someone’s just trying to make a point.) Filmed across Hawaii and New Zealand and thoughtfully designed, it’s always a pleasure to look at, notwithstanding some dodgy CGI in the volcano scene. (Yes, there’s a volcano.) There is one red-hued orgy scene (denoting villainy) too many — which is to say, there’s one. The score, by Hans Zimmer and James Everingham, is Hollywood-obvious, and the series as a whole is not immune to corniness — but that is sometimes just another word for love.

The practice of building a situation comedy around a stand-up comedian is hallowed television practice, going back to Jack Benny and Danny Thomas and running forward through Bob Newhart, Roseanne Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, George Lopez and Martin Lawrence, among others. These “based on the comedy” shows are predicated on the not unreasonable and frequently demonstrable idea that the star comes with a built-in audience — the show and the character usually share their name — and that a person who is good at telling stories onstage might be a good fit for the multi-camera TV stage. This hasn’t been true of every comic given a show; even someone as reliably hilarious as John Mulaney was an uneasy fit for the form.

“Leanne,” which premieres Thursday on Netflix, stars Leanne Morgan, a 25-year overnight sensation from Knoxville, Tenn., whose star rose above the cultural horizon when she was already most of her way through her fifties. (She is 59 now.) Co-creator Chuck Lorre (with Morgan and Susan McMartin), the man behind “Cybill,” “Dharma & Greg,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory,” earlier built “Grace Under Fire” around another Southern stand-up, Brett Butler. The premise here is essentially: newly single mature woman in a sitcom.

If the people around her are mostly types into which the players pour themselves, Morgan is more a person into which a character has been inserted. TV Leanne is not exactly Real Leanne, who is to all appearances happily married; is on tour through the year (under the title “Just Getting Started”); has starred in a Netflix special, “I’m Every Woman”; published a book, “What in the World?! A Southern Woman’s Guide to Laughing at Life’s Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings”; and, obviously, is starring in this situation comedy. Other than living in Knoxville, having children and grandchildren and representing someone more or less her own age, she is not playing herself; yet there’s an honesty to her performance, possibly not unrelated to her being new at this. (Her only previous screen credit is a supporting role in this year’s Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon meh Prime Video rom-com “You’re Cordially Invited.”) Even the hackiest jokes sound less hacky in her mouth, perhaps because she doesn’t strain to sell them. Her delivery tends toward the soft and musical, and that she is wearing her own accent, which, to a Californian’s ear, plays charming variations on vowels, is all to the good.

As we begin, Leanne, the character, is primarily defined, like negative space, by the figures around her. There is a husband, Bill (Ryan Stiles) who has just left her for a younger woman, an event so fresh that only her sister, Carol (Kristen Johnston), knows; single, twice-divorced, up for fun, Carol regards herself as sophisticated because she once lived in Chicago. Daughter Josie (Hannah Pilkes) is a little wild, but not particularly troublesome; in any case, no one pays her much attention. Son Tyler (Graham Rogers), upon whom Leanne dotes, works for his father, who owns three RV emporiums — accounting for the nice house that’s the series’ main set — and comes equipped with a mostly off-screen pregnant wife, Nora (Annie Gonzalez); he feels oppressed, but perhaps he’s just tired. Leanne’s parents, John (Blake Clark) and Margaret (Celia Weston) are around for grousing and goofiness, respectively. Across the street lives Mary (Jayma Mays), the embodiment of nosy propriety in a town that can’t keep a secret.

Leanne recalls how back in the ‘80s she was “cute” and desirable “because I had hormones, and hair spray, and a VW bug with a pull-out cassette player.” (This is also a motif in Morgan’s stand-up.) Now she’s careful and proper, and can barely bring herself to chastely kiss the nice FBI agent, Andrew (Tim Daly), who wanders into the show as a potential romance. (Morgan said on the “Today” show that Daly was in fact the first man she’d kissed apart from her husband in 33 years. Art and life.) One hopes he won’t turn out to be a murderer, which would 80% be the case if this were a mystery. But I reckon we’re safe.

Younger viewers who find themselves here may be put off by jokes about hot flashes, pelvic exercises, enlarged prostrates and such and perhaps especially by sex jokes in the mouths of old — well, older — people. (I feel you there, youngsters.) The representative demographic may chuckle knowingly, or not.

Here is Leanne, flirting with Andrew in their first encounter.

Andrew (swallowing some pills): “I had to have a thing and now I have to take these things every four hours or I might have to have … another thing.”

Leanne (sweetly): “I got things. My purse is a little Walgreens with a cute strap.”

Every fourth or fifth joke has the air of having been hammered out on an anvil, and a few might have been better left in the smithery. Yet I like this show, in no small part but not entirely because I like Morgan — the way she says “spaseba, that’s Russian for thank you” to a bartender handing her a vodka, and sings a bit of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” to herself.

The company, which supports the star with veterans of “Third Rock From the Sun,” “The Drew Carey Show” and “Wings,” is generally good company, and I’m happy to see that “Leanne” has a broadcast-style 18 episode season, time being an American sitcom’s best friend. (I would give it a few episodes to make up your mind.)

Apart from the star herself, the show is as conventional as can be. A character embarking on a new chapter is, of course, the starting point of every third sitcom ever made, but given that many of us have either had to start new chapters or wish we could, it’s a suitable way to start.

Michael Shanks’ “Together” is the only romance you’ll see this year that’s infatuated by John Carpenter and Plato.

A fusion of body horror and couples therapy, it centers on a sunken cave with a pool of water that, when sipped, makes cells thirst to meld with the nearest mammal. In the opening sequence, this urge to merge overtakes two dogs who smush together like the monster mutt in “The Thing.” (Thankfully, the camera doesn’t linger; the whimpering is plenty.) Now, it’s Tim and Millie’s turn. The unhappy boyfriend and girlfriend, played by real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie, have moved from the city to the forest anticipating that the scenery change will make or break their relationship. Blend is more like it.

How does ancient philosophy squeeze into a gooey metaphor for codependence? According to Jamie (Damon Herriman), a history teacher at the school where Millie works, Plato’s “Symposium” claims that humans were once rebellious, eight-limbed beings who tumbled around doing cartwheels. Zeus cleaved us pesky mortals in two as a form of control, figuring that we’d be so consumed by the quest to find our other half that we’d never get around to toppling Mount Olympus — and if that didn’t work, he’d leave us “on one leg, hopping.” (Shanks can save that for the sequel.)

It’s worth noting that Plato was kidding, a three-millennium-old joke that’s essentially, “Take my wife — Zeus!” But mating does preoccupy our mental bandwidth, and welding together two lives is unwieldy. Tim and Millie have been dating for a decade, from their hopeful 20s to their resigned 30s, and have become so mismatched in maturity that their efforts to stick together feel less like giddy Grecian handsprings and more like a three-legged race. As Millie confesses early on, “I’m not sure if we love each other or if we’re just used to each other.”

Brie and Franco lend the fictional couple their intimacy, but dial down their spark. Only a few scenes allow their characters any welcome emotional connection. There’s no sense of peeking behind their celebrity curtain, so we’re with Millie’s best friend Cath (Mia Morrissey) when she openly wishes the pair would split for good. But Millie and Tim have leaned on each other so long that neither is sure how to stand on their own. The emotional and physical pain to come has the sense of being aboard a train chugging toward certain disaster. There’s opportunities to jump off, but no one has the nerve to try.

Alison Brie, left, and Dave Franco in “Together.”

(Ben King / Neon)

Shanks is attuned to how a long-term twosome divides up duties (and identities), defining themselves by what each one contributes and, in the process, becoming less of a whole person. Tim can’t drive. Millie can’t cook. Tim is the broke musician. Millie has the steady job. “I’m the boring one,” she says begrudgingly. Meanwhile, the resentful girl struggles to label Tim’s role, stammering to Jamie that she lives with, “my partner, my Tim, my boy-partner Tim.”

“Boy-partner” sounds right. The design teams have outfitted Franco’s hipster with goofy sweatshirts and a fledgling mullet. He can’t even commit to the most famously noncommittal hairstyle. Yet, before long, Tim finds he’s unable to leave Millie’s side for a moment. Every time he touches her, the rest of the world seems to disappear: The focus goes shallow, the fine hairs on Brie’s skin dapple in the light, her muscles creak as loudly as tectonic plates. She’s confused. He keeps apologizing, becoming increasingly flustered and frantic.

The film will go on to have memorably fleshy visuals. (Picture massaging butter underneath the raw skin of a Thanksgiving turkey.) “It Happened One Night’s” Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable relied on a flimsy Wall of Jericho to keep themselves separated. Here, when things get tricky, Millie and Tim reach for an electric handsaw.

Gross? Totally. But empathetic too. Brie’s Millie is sensible and vulnerable, while Franco manages to makes us pity his bad boyfriend Tim. Part of his aloofness comes from grieving his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent mental breakdown; the rest is his shame that his rock ‘n’ roll dreams have yet to become reality. “I thought you’d make Millie cooler,” her younger brother Luke (Jack Kenny) says. “Instead …” Luke adds with a snort, as the rest of the sentence slides into the abyss, taking Tim’s ego with it.

For a first-time feature director, Shanks expertly fuses himself to the audience’s POV. He knows that we know where this is going — the title gives the game away — so his job is to goose the inevitable in ways that make us squirm and gasp. Working with the cinematographer Germain McMicking and the production designer Nicholas Dare, he plunks us into standard jump scare scenarios — the dark hallway, the subterranean lair — and then tricks our eyes into looking at the wrong corner of the frame.

His talent for misdirection also applies to the narrative. Shanks expects us to clock the unacknowledged wedding ring on Herriman’s Jamie, a Hallmark rom-com charmer, and so his script takes our suspicions and twists them once, twice and a third time for good measure. Even steeled for a plot point we’re dreading — the couple making the terrible choice to do something more adult than hold hands — when the scene finally arrives, it’s ickier and more humiliating than we could have imagined.

My quibbles with the ending are too close to spoilers to cite outright. But the delight of the film is that its editor Sean Lahiff has the rhythm of a shock comic. He favors nasty jolts and cartoonish rim shots, like when Millie advises Tim not to do anything stupid and Lahiff immediately smash-cuts to the guy running off full-tilt. Nothing about “Together” screams comedy, yet that’s precisely how it’s put together. Awkward humor is the skeleton under its prestige nightmare surface, even as it’s wonderfully, heartbreakingly tragic to watch our leads roil to melt together like mozzarella. How’s that for an update on the old quip? Make my wife — cheese!

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina reshaped the city of New Orleans.

Spike Lee examined the disaster with two big HBO documentaries, the 2006 “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” just a year after the event, and a 2010 sequel, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” and he is involved with a new work for Netflix, “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” arriving in late August. Other nonfiction films have been made on the subject over the years, including “Trouble the Water,” winner of the grand jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nova’s “Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City,” “Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of the Children,” and “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues,” while the storm also framed the excellent 2022 hospital-set docudrama “Five Days at Memorial.” As a personified disaster with a human name and a week-long arc, it remains famous, or infamous, and indelible.

In the gripping five-part “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” premiering over two subsequent nights beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. on National Geographic (all episodes stream on Hulu and Disney+ on Monday), director Traci A. Curry (“Attica”) necessarily repeats many of Lee’s incidents and themes. But she finds her own way through mountains of material in the series that is at once highly compelling and difficult to watch — though I suggest you do.

Though there are many paths to take through the story, they lead to the same conclusions. Curry speaks with survivors, activists, scientists, officials and journalists, some of whom also appear in archival footage, but her eye is mainly on the victims: the people who lost their homes, people who lost their people, those unable to evacuate, for lack of money or transportation or the need to care for family members. If the storm itself was an assault on the city, most everything else — the broken levees, the flooded streets, the slow government response, the misinformation, the exaggerations and the mischaracterizations taken as fact — constituted an attack on the poor, which in New Orleans meant mostly Black people. (“The way they depicted Black folks,” says one survivor regarding sensational media coverage of the aftermath, when troops with automatic weapons patrolled the streets as if in a war zone, “it’s like they didn’t see us as regular people, law abiding, churchgoing, hard-working people.”)

Effective both as an informational piece and a real-life drama, “Race Against Time” puts you deep into the story, unfolding as the week did. First, the calm before the storm (“One of the most peaceful scariest things that a person can experience,” says one 8th Ward resident), as Katrina gained power over the Gulf of Mexico. Then the storm, which ripped off part of the Superdome roof, where citizens had been instructed to shelter, and plunged the city into darkness; but when that passed, it looked briefly like the apocalypse missed them.

Then the levees, never well designed, were breached in multiple locations and 80% of the city, which sits in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, found itself under water. Homes drown: “You’re looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your belongings being ruined, your mother’s furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.” Residents are driven onto roofs, hoping for rescue, while dead bodies float in the water. This is also in many ways the most heartening part of the series, as neighbors help neighbors and firefighters and police set about rescuing as many as possible, going house to house in boats running on gasoline siphoned from cars and trucks. A Coast Guardsman tears up at the memory of carrying a baby in her bare arms as they were winched into a helicopter.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Malik Rahim, a community organizer, was a resident of Algiers Point in New Orleans. (National Geographic)

Lt. General Russel Honore served as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina and is widely credited for reestablishing order and evacuating the Superdome. (National Geographic)

And then we descend into a catalog of institutional failures — of governance, of communication, of commitment, of nerve, of common sense, of service, of the media — which, camped in the unflooded French Quarter or watching from afar, repeated rumors as fact, helping create a climate of fear. (Bill O’Reilly, then still sitting pretty at Fox News, suggests looters should be shot dead.) More people escaping the flood arrive at the Superdome, where the bathrooms and the air conditioning don’t work, there’s no food or water and people suffer in the August heat, waiting for days to be evacuated. Instead, the National Guard comes to town along with federal troops, which residents of this city know is not necessarily a good thing.

Many speakers here make a deep impression — community organizer Malik Rahim, sitting on his porch, speaking straight to the camera, with his long white hair and beard, is almost a guiding spirit — but the star of this show is the eminently sensible Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré (now retired), a Louisiana Creole who was finally brought in to coordinate operations between FEMA and the military. (We see him walking through the streets, ordering soldiers to “put your guns on your back, don’t be pointing guns at nobody.”) Honoré, who is free with his opinions here, had respect for the victims — “When you’re poor in America, you’re not free, and when you’re poor, you learn to have patience” — but none for foolish officialdom, the main fool being FEMA director Michael Brown, mismanaging from Baton Rouge, who would resign soon after the hurricane.

When buses finally did arrive, passengers were driven away, and some later flown off, with no announcement of where they were headed; family members might be scattered around the country. Many would never return to New Orleans, and some who did no longer recognized the place they left, not only because of the damage, but because of the new development.

The arrival of this and the upcoming Lee documentary is dictated by the calendar, but the timing is also fortuitous, given where we are now. Floods and fires, storms and cyclones are growing more frequent and intense, even as Washington strips money from the very agencies designed to predict and mitigate them or aid in recovery. Last week, Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA’s urban search and rescue unit, resigned, reportedly over the agency’s Trump-hobbled response to the Texas flood, following the departure of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA’s disaster command center. Trump, for his part, wants to do away with the agency completely.

And yet Curry manages to end her series on an optimistic note. Residents of the Lower 9th Ward have returned dying wetlands to life, creating a community park that will help control the next storm surge. Black Masking Indians — a.k.a. Mardi Gras Indians — are still sewing their fanciful, feathered costumes and parading in the street.

Late in Italian writer-director Giovanni Tortorici’s pop-up book of a coming-of-age movie “Diciannove (Nineteen),” there’s a great scene in which his arrogant, neurotic protagonist, Leonardo (Manfredi Marini), a student of classical Italian literature in Siena, is visiting a cousin (Zackari Delmas) attending university in Milan. As the two commiserate over crazy adventures, the chatter turns to disagreements and griping (culture, language, kids today, drugs aren’t fun anymore) and suddenly they sound like middle-aged men bemoaning why anything ever had to change.

The cusp of 20 is a laughably unformed time to be convinced of anything, but what Tortorici’s higgledy-piggledy debut feature makes breathlessly clear is that when you’re in the middle of it, youth is a candy-colored tornado of temptations and responsibilities. You’re the star of your own solipsistic, hallucinatory epic, even if what you imagine for yourself might be a straightforward affair with a clear-cut message about the meaning of life.

“Diciannove” hums with the dissonance of repression plus expression in Leonardo’s consequential 19th year. If you notice a similarity to the playful moods and textures of Tortorici’s countryman Luca Guadagnino, there’s a reason: The “Call Me by Your Name” filmmaker produced his protégé Tortorici’s autobiographical debut feature and a lineage of tenderness and vivacity in evoking the emotional waves of adolescence is more than evident.

We meet Leonardo as a nosebleed-suffering, dreamy-eyed Palermo teen with a haranguing mom. He’s headed to business school in London, where his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta) also lives. But once there, after a round of hard-partying with her friends and the sense that he’s replaced one hypercritical family member for another, he makes a last-minute decision to change the course of his educational life and enroll as a literature student back in Italy.

Cut to picturesque Siena and cue the baroque score. In this ancient Tuscan city, Leonardo is awakened by his writerly ambitions, a swoony love for medieval Italian authors like Dante and an intellectual disdain for the 20th century. But it also turns him into a lonely, rigidly neoclassicist oddball who scorns his professors, prefers books to his flighty peers and still can’t seem to take care of himself. Sealing himself off in a stuffy, antiquated notion of personal morality only makes the trappings of real life (desire, depression, cleanliness, online enticements) harder to deal with, leading his journey of self-discovery to some internally and externally messy places.

And some messy filmmaking too, even if that’s the point of this elegantly shapeless headspace travelogue. With unapologetic brio, Tortorici, cinematographer Massimiliano Kuveiller and editor Marco Costa empty out their tool kit of angles, splits, tracks, smudges, zooms, smashes, jumps, needle drops, montages and text cards. Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting. There’s an easygoing inscrutability to his demeanor and his sad, mischievous eyes compel our curiosity — he’ll never let you think you’ve watched a thousand coming-of-age movies.

Tortorici doesn’t give his searcher a tidy ending. There’s a hilarious psychoanalysis by a wealthy aesthete (Sergio Benvenuto) who sees right through his posturing. But the night air beckons. As Leonardo walks away from us at the end after serving up a rascally smile (in a very “400 Blows”-ish freeze frame), Tortorici has him stumble briefly on the cobblestones, and somehow it feels like the wit of “Diciannove” in a split second of screen time: Youth means missteps, so why dwell on them?

July 24 (UPI) — President Donald Trump will head to the Federal Reserve on Thursday amid his ongoing calls for Chair Jerome Powell to resign.

A U.S. president hasn’t visited the nation’s central bank since President George W. Bush in 2006. Trump is slated to arrive at 4 p.m. EDT and take an hour-long tour of the site, as he has expressed disdain for renovations at the office building.

The $2.5 billion renovation project has been part of Trump’s criticism Powell, and the Trump administration has also pushed at Powell, who Trump nominated to the job in 2017.

Trump, as recently as Wednesday, lashed out at Powell, who he has dubbed “Too Late.”

“Housing in our country is lagging because Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell refuses to lower interest rates,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Wednesday. “Families are being hurt because interest rates are too high, and even our country is having to pay a higher rate than it should be because of ‘Too Late.'”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who has also taken to referring to Powell as “Too Late” on social media, has also been critical of the renovations. Blair has accused the Fed of trying to hide what is being spent on the project before announcing Tuesday that Trump and his people will be making the Thursday visit.

Blair had said on Monday that the Fed released a virtual video of its offices in what he considered an effort to stymie a review at the construction.

“What do they not want us to see?” he said on X.

“We go Thursday!” Blair posted to X Tuesday after inferring that the Fed had relented on blocking a visit due to pressure by the White House.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday on X he has called for an assessment of the Federal Reserve.

“While I have no knowledge or opinion on the legal basis for the massive building renovations being undertaken,” Bessent said. “A review of the decision to undertake such a project by an institution reporting operating losses of more than $100 billion per year should be conducted.”

Trump has expressed in the past a desire to fire Powell and has suggested that overruns on the cost of the renovations would be a viable excuse to terminate the Fed Chairman. However, Trump has since yielded on that notion and has indicated he will likely instead allow Powell to keep his job until his term expires next May.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas lawmakers on Wednesday began reviewing the Fourth of July floods that killed at least 136 people, a disaster that put local officials under scrutiny over why residents along the Guadalupe River did not receive more warnings.

The catastrophic floods in the Texas Hill Country and a partisan redrawing of U.S. House maps, aimed at giving Republicans more winnable seats in the 2026 elections, are two major issues in a 30-day special session that is already off to a combative start.

Democrats want to address flood relief and new flood warning systems before taking votes on new congressional maps sought by President Trump. They have not ruled out a walkout in a bid to derail the redistricting, which they have slammed as a partisan power grab.

State and county emergency response officials are scheduled to testify, but no officials from Kerr County, the area most hard-hit by the floods, are expected to appear.

Committee chair Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said local officials were not asked to come to the capitol to avoid pulling them away from their work. “Our select committee will not armchair quarterback or attempt to assign blame,” Perry said.

The head of Texas emergency management department, Nim Kidd, confirmed Wednesday that the number of deaths was 136, up from 135.

Two people remain missing, a man and a girl from Camp Mystic, according to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. At one point, county officials said more than 170 people were unaccounted for, but ultimately found that most were safe.

Twenty-seven campers and counselors, most of them children, were killed at the all-girls Christian summer camp in Kerr County, which does not have a warning system along the river after several missed opportunities by state and local agencies to finance one.

Lawmakers have filed bills to improve early warning systems and emergency communications and to provide relief funding. Legislators are scheduled to visit Kerrville on July 31 to hear from residents.

Democrats have left open the possibility of filibusters or walking out in the coming weeks to block the proposed congressional map redraw. On Monday, most of the party’s members in the House signed a letter to the speaker stating that they would not engage in any work before addressing flood relief.

But Democrats have few paths to resistance as the minority party in both chambers. Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton has threatened to arrest those who attempt to walk out on top of the $500-a-day fines lawmakers face for breaking a quorum.

Lathan writes for the Associated Press.

“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” slots into summer blockbuster season like a square peg in a round popcorn bucket. Prestige TV director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”) isn’t inclined to pretzel himself like the flexible Reed Richards to please all four quadrants of the multiplex. His staid superhero movie plays like classic sci-fi in which adults wearing sweater vests solemnly brainstorm how to resolve a crisis. Watching it, I felt as snug as being nestled in the backseat of my grandparents’ car at the drive-in.

This reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise — the third in two decades — is lightyears closer to 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” than it is to the frantic, over-cluttered superhero epics that have come to define modern entertainment. Set on Earth 828, an alternate universe that borrows our own Atomic Age decor, it doesn’t just look old, it moves old. The tone and pace are as sure-footed as globe-gobbling Galactus, this film’s heavy, purposefully marching into alt-world Manhattan. Even its tidy running time is from another epoch. Under two hours? Now that’s vintage chic.

“First Steps” picks up several years after four astronauts — Reed (Pedro Pascal), his wife, Sue (Vanessa Kirby), his brother-in-law Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and his best friend Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — get themselves blasted by cosmic rays that endow them with special powers. You may know the leads better as, respectively, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing. For mild comic relief, they also pal around with a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., voiced by Matthew Wood.

Skipping their origin story keeps things tight while underlining the idea that these are settled-down grown-ups secure in their abilities to lengthen, disappear, ignite and clobber. Fans might argue they should be a bit more neurotic; screenplay structuralists will grumble they have no narrative arc. The mere mortals of Earth 828 respect the squad for their brains and their brawn — they’re celebrities in a genteel pre-paparazzi time — but these citizens are also prone to despair when they aren’t sure Pascal’s workaholic daddy will save them.

Lore has it Stan Lee was a married, middle-aged father aging out of writing comic books when his beloved spouse, Joan, elbowed him to develop characters who felt personal. The graying, slightly boring Reed was a loose-limbed version of himself: the ultimate wife guy with the ultimate wife.

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But Hollywood has aged-down Lee’s “quaint quartet,” as he called them, at its own peril. Make the Fantastic Four cool (as the movies have repeatedly tried and failed to do) and they come across as desperately lame. This time, Shakman and the script’s four-person writing team of Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer valorize their lameness and restore their dignity. Pascal’s Mr. Fantastic is so buttoned-down that he tucks his tie into his dress shirt.

The scenario is that Sue is readying to give birth to the Richards’ first child just as the herald Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), a.k.a. the Silver Surfer, barrels into the atmosphere to politely inform humanity that her boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) has RSVP-ed yes to her invitation that he devour their planet. In a biologically credible touch, the animators have added tarnish to her cleavage: “I doubt she was naked,” Reed says evenly. “It was probably a stellar polymer.”

Typically, this threat would trigger a madcap fetch-this-gizmo caper (as it did in the original comic). Shakman’s version doesn’t waste its energy or our time on that. Rather, this a lean showdown between self-control and gluttony, between our modest heroes and a greedy titan. It’s at the Venn diagram of a Saturday morning cartoon and a moralistic Greek myth.

The film is all sleek lines, from its themes to its architecture to its images. The visuals by the cinematographer Jess Hall are crisp and impactful: a translucent hand snatching at a womb, a character falling into the pull of a yawning black hole, a torso stretched like chewing gum, a rocket launch that can’t blast off until we get a close-up of everyone buckling their seatbelts. Even in space, the CG isn’t razzle-dazzle busy. Meanwhile, Michael Giacchino’s score soars between bleats of triumph and barbershop-chorus charm, a combination that can sound like an automobile show unveiling the first convertible with tail fins.

There is little brawling and less snark. No one comes off like an aspiring stand-up comic. These characters barely raise their voices and often use their abilities on the mundane: Kirby’s Sue vanishes to avoid awkward conversations, Moss-Bachrach’s Ben, in a nod to his breakout role as the maître d’ on “The Bear,” uses his mighty fists to mash garlic. Johnny, the youngest and most literally hotheaded of the group, is apt to light himself on fire when he can’t be bothered to find a flashlight. He delivers the meanest quip in a respectful movie when he tells Reed, “I take back every single bad thing I’ve been saying about you … to myself, in private.”

Yes, my audience giggled dutifully at the jiggling Jell-O salads and drooled over the groovy conversation pits in the Richards’ living room, the only super lair I’d ever live in. The color palette emphasizes retro shades of blue, green and gold; even the extras have coordinated their outfits to the trim on the Fantasticar. Delightfully, when Moss-Bachrach’s brawny rock monster strolls to the deli to buy black-and-white cookies, he’s wearing a gargantuan pair of penny loafers.

If you want to feel old, the generation of middle schoolers who saw 2008’s “Iron Man” on opening weekend are now beginning to raise their own children. Thirty-seven films later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten so insecure about its own mission that it’s pitching movies at every maturity level. The recent “Thunderbolts*” is for surly teenagers, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is the drunk, divorced uncle at a BBQ, and “First Steps” extends a sympathetic hand to young families who identify with Reed’s frustration that he can’t childproof the entire galaxy.

Here, for a mass audience, Kirby gets to reprise her underwatched Oscar-nominated turn in “Pieces of a Woman,” in which she extended out a 24-minute, single-take labor scene. This karaoke snippet is good (and even a little operatic when the pain makes her dematerialize). I was as impressed by the costumer Alexandra Byrne’s awareness that even super moms won’t immediately snap back into wearing tight spandex. (By contrast, when Jessica Alba played Sue in 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” the director notoriously asked her to be “prettier” when she cried.)

This reboot’s boldest stride toward progress is that it values emotionally credible performances. Otherwise, Pascal aside, you wouldn’t assemble this cast for any audience besides critics and dweebs (myself included) who keep a running list of their favorite not-quite-brand-name talents who are ready to break through to the next level of their career while yelling, “It’s clobbering time!”

Still, this isn’t anyone’s best role, and it’s a great movie only when compared to similarly budgeted dreck. Yet it’s a worthy exercise in creating something that doesn’t feel nostalgic for an era — it feels of an era. Even if the MCU’s take on slow cinema doesn’t sell tickets in our era, I admire the confidence of a movie that sets its own course instead of chasing the common wisdom that audiences want 2½ hours of chaos. Studio executives continuing to insist on that nonsense deserve Marvel’s first family to give them a disappointed talking-to, and send them to back their boardrooms without supper.

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s “Washington Black,” a prizewinning story of race, romance, friendship and identity set in the early 19th century, has been translated by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison into a Hulu miniseries. Unsurprisingly, it plays more like a miniseries than a novel, amplifying the action, the drama and the romance; beefing up lesser characters; drawing lines under, after all, valid points about prejudice, inequality and injustice; and dressing it up with Hollywood musical cues. Taking the show as a sometimes fantastic historical adventure, those aren’t bad things, but, unlike the book, subtlety is not the series’ strong suit.

Written in the first person, the novel proceeds chronologically, while the series, which follows other, sometimes added characters into interpolated storylines, switches between 1830 — when our hero, George Washington Black, called Wash, is 11 years old and enslaved on a Barbados sugar plantation — and 1837, when he lives as a free young man in Halifax, Nova Scotia, drawing beautiful pictures and designing a before-its-time airship. (For the benefit of American viewers wondering why we’re in Halifax, opening narration helpfully identifies it as the last stop on the Underground Railroad.)

The split timeline does make Entertainment Sense. We don’t have to wait around for young Wash (Eddie Karanja) to grow up into older Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.), and we are immediately introduced to Tanna Goff (Iola Evans), arriving from London with her father (Rupert Graves) for a “fresh start.” (There was a scandal back in Britain.) Unbeknownst to Tanna, her father plans to marry her off to a young Canadian bigwig (Edward Bluemel), for what he believes is her own security. This is new, if very familiar, material.

Wash and Tanna meet-cute at the docks where he works, when based on her skin, he mistakes her for a servant — she’s been passing for white, but he (and we) recognize her as a person of color. (Melanesian, to be exact.) In the coming days, he’ll contrive to meet her here and there, until they get friendly, and friendlier. Like Wash, she’ll be a voice for living free, “to be myself, to live in my own skin.” (“We’re both dreamers,” she muses. “Can’t we dream up a different world?”) Coincidentally, and not unfortunately, her papa is a marine biologist, the author of a book Wash, who has a keen interest in the subject, knows well. Wash’s gift for capturing the essence of living things on paper may prove useful to him.

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1. Eddie Karanja plays young Wash in the series. (James Van Evers / Disney) 2. Sterling K. Brown, an executive producer, also stars. (Chris Reardon / Disney)

Meanwhile, if that’s the word, back in 1830, the future looks dim for young Wash under the harsh rule of plantation owner Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), a situation eased only by his beloved caring protector Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson). (Ironically, the end of slavery throughout the British Empire was just around the corner.) One day, Erasmus’ brother Christopher (Tom Ellis), called Titch, arrives driving a giant steam-powered tractor for no practical reason other than to announce him as a somewhat eccentric inventor, like Caractacus Pott; but it provides a point of connection between Titch and Wash, who becomes his assistant. Another character who had to leave London, Titch plans to use an island hilltop to launch his “cloud cutter,” a flying machine that won’t exist in the real world for many years but which looks cool. (Steampunk is the applicable term.)

When an incident on the island threatens to paint Wash, wrongly, as a murderer, Titch takes him up, up and away in his beautiful balloon. It’s in the supercharged spirit of this adaptation that when they crash into a sailing ship, it should be full of pirates, and not merely pirates, but pirates who have stolen from the British a new sort of craft powered by a dynamo that looks heavy enough to sink it. This passage is crafted to show us a self-determined society, multiethnic and multigendered. When the pirates mutiny (bloodlessly), the new captain is a woman. They like Wash more than Titch, whom they throw in the brig, but they are nice, relatively speaking.

Titch is an avowed abolitionist who won’t use the sugar the plantation produces, and though we are called upon to note small hypocrisies or to question his motivations — is he trying to assuage his 19th century white liberal guilt even as he uses Wash to his own ends? — I will declare him sincere, if also a man of his time. The showrunners put him into a (very) brief debate with fierce figure from history Nat Turner (Jamie Hector), opposing Turner’s militarism against Titch’s less persuasive “reason, logic and the appeal to man’s better nature,” an argument suspended when Turner holds a knife to his throat. (Wash intercedes on his behalf; he is more than once his mentor’s protector.) It also adds a shot of American history into this Canadian story.

Sterling K. Brown, an executive producer, plays Medwin, a character much expanded from the novel, the unofficial mayor of the Black community who will swashbuckle in when a day needs to be saved. (There are bounty hunters from down south, looking for Wash; Billy Boyd, former Hobbit, is wonderfully creepy as Willard.) As to Wash, it’s not enough that he’s a gifted artist and scientist; the show introduces him as “a boy brave enough to change the world.”

The novel trots the globe, from Barbados to Virginia to Nova Scotia to the Arctic to London to Morocco, and besides the hot-air balloon, includes the invention of the public aquarium. Though only four episodes of the series were available to review, photos indicate that lands of snow and sand are indeed on the itinerary (not sure about the aquarium), and as a fan of 19th century globe-trotting adventures, I do remain eager to see what the series makes of them. Kingsley and Evans, in their blossoming love story and otherwise, are good company throughout.

Edugyan ends her book on a suspended chord, a note of mystery I don’t imagine will be definitive enough for the filmmakers. But we shall see.

In “The Hunting Wives,” a brightly configured murder mystery cum cartoon sex opera premiering Monday on Netflix, Brittany Snow plays Sophie O’Neil, newly arrived from Boston with husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) and prop young son to fictional Maple Brook, Texas, a rich people’s town somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas. Graham is an architect, seemingly — at one point he will say, “Soph, you gotta check out this joinery,” which, in the three episodes out for review, is as specific as that will get — who has come to work for rich person Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) to build “the new Banks HQ.” What will happen in there is not said.

The O’Neils step into this world by way of a fundraiser at which Banks, who wants to be governor, is making a speech in support of the National Rifle Assn., highlighting the need for guns for “good people” to fend off “all sorts of evil sumbitches” and the “personas malos keep pouring in every day” across the border. This is as much of a platform as he will bother to have; plotwise, the point is that running for office may expose his swinging private life to public scrutiny.

Over the course of the party, we meet the major players: Jill (Katie Lowes) is married to Rev. Clint (Jason Davis), who runs the local megachurch; her son Brad (George Ferrier) — who would be named Brad — is an unpleasant slab of basketball-playing meat who is seeing, which is to say, trying to sleep with Abby (Madison Wolfe), a nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks. (Jill is against the relationship; Abby’s mother, Starr, played by Chrissy Metz, has her own reservations.) Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), second among the eponymous wives, is married to Sheriff Jonny (Branton Box); I’m not sure whether Jonny is his first or last name, but this does seem the kind of place where the sheriff would be known by his first. Supplementary wives Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry) are just there to make up the numbers.

Most important is Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), whom Sophie encounters in a bathroom where she has gone to take a Xanax for her social anxiety, and who, within seconds and not for the last time, is casually topless. Margo has no social anxiety.

She seizes on Sophie as fresh blood, or from some genuine connection, or because she recognizes in the newcomer the sort of person who needs a person like her, someone Margo can productively dominate to their mutual advantage. Margo immediately declares they’ll be besties — creating a rift with Callie, the current occupant of that role, who, radiating jealousy at every pore, is determined to get between them.

Sophie, Graham seems proud to announce, was once “a bit of a wild child … a party girl” who became a career woman — a political PR operative — and, for the last seven years, a full-time mother. He has a lightly controlling, “for your own good” manner, keeping her from drinking or driving — there’ll be a reason for that, you’ll have guessed — but before long, she will drink, and she will drive. “Two rules,” says Margo, getting her behind the wheel. “Trust me and do everything I say.”

Drafted into Margo’s world, Sophie is soon shooting skeet, and then, having bought her own guns, wild boar. I cite again the Chekhov dictum to the effect that a gun in the first act ought to go off in the second, but there are so many about here, and our attention so significantly drawn to them, it would be a shock if some didn’t fire — the only questions being which and when and whose, pointed at what or whom.

Developed by Rebecca Perry Cutter (“Hightown”) from May Cobb’s 2021 novel of the same name, the series offers a light dusting of political references — “deplorables,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, no abortion clinics “left to bomb,” negative mentions of feminism and liberals — that might as easily been left off in light of the insular fantasyland within which “The Hunting Wives” operates. (Did J.R. Ewing ever express a political opinion?) Given the context — liberal Northerners camped among conservative Southerners — one might have expected a “Stepford Wives” scenario, but this is something different. Within, or exploiting, their sociocultural limits (“We don’t work, we wife,” says Monae proudly), the women party heartily while the men, even when nominally powerful, come across as comparatively bland, uninteresting and distracted. Graham, who is very nice, can seem positively dim; “Take my wife, please,” he’ll happily joke when Margo rides up on a jet ski to spirit Sophie away from a family day at the lake.

The characters are types, but the actors fill them out well, and the dynamic between Margo and Sophie really is … dynamic. Margo is intriguing because she’s hard to figure. Like Sophie, she has a hidden past — when a mysterious figure at the local roadhouse (Jullian Dulce Vida) calls her Mandy, it makes her atypically nervous because, obviously, she was once called Mandy. She lies to her husband; she’s having sex with Brad, which just seems like bad taste. But there’s something authentic and genuine about Margo magnified by Akerman’s entrancing performance. Margo is a temptress, the devil on Sophie’s shoulder — but maybe the angel too.

Lest we forget, there’s a murder, which opens the show in a flash forward; the series catches up with it by the end of Episode 3. (It brings in Karen Rodriguez as Det. Salazar, which promises good things.) There’s also a briefly mentioned missing girl, which will certainly tie in somehow. But with only three episodes out of eight seen, it’s impossible to say where it’s all going — unless you’ve read the book, I suppose, but even then, you never know. What’s clear is that there’ll be more secrets to reveal, with skeletons tumbling out of every closet. And these are big houses, with plenty of storage.

An early line from “Salt Bones,” the latest novel from talented poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan, reads, “Daughters disappear here.”

It is a line that haunts the Salton Sea region, where Givhan has set her latest novel and infuses the toxic air upon which her characters must survive. In other words, this warning to keep your daughters close clings to everything. It is in the air, but also — in this thriller that employs elements of magical realism and mystery — it is in the water, buffeting each of these characters with the cadence of windblown waves crashing against the shore.

The Salton Sea is just as much a character here as Givhan’s main protagonists: Mal, a mother of two daughters, and the two daughters themselves — Amaranta, in high school, and Griselda, a science major in college. Through them, we get a sense of this place, what it was, what it is and what it is becoming. A sea that evaporates and pulls back year after year, exposing a lake bed contaminated with agricultural runoff and revealing not just the bones of fish but also a painful history that many would rather remains beneath the water’s surface.

“Salt Bones” by Jennifer Givhan

(Mulholland Books)

El Valle, the fictional town that serves as the primary setting for “Salt Bones,” is haunted by what surrounds it. By the memories of the missing. Daughters like Mal’s own sister, Elena, who disappeared more than 20 years before.

Now with two daughters of her own, Mal is a butcher at the local carnicería. But when one of the workers at the shop, Renata, a young woman the same age as Mal’s eldest daughter, doesn’t show up for work one day, Mal begins to spiral into the past, questioning what she could have done differently, and then what she could do now. And, most of all, why does all of this seem to keep happening here in El Valle?

For Mal and her family, there is no escape. They are followed not just by memories, but also by Mal’s mother’s spite-fueled dementia, which returns all of them again and again to the fissures in time just before and just after the disappearance of Mal’s sister. And now, with Renata gone missing, there is nowhere to hide from the tragedy of this place, not at work, not at home and not even at the edges of the Salton Sea where Mal can sometimes find a tenuous peace.

But it is not just Mal who roams these shores, but La Siguanaba, a shape-shifter often associated with Central American and Mexican folklore, wearing “whatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all.” And then after enticing these men to approach, this being — often described as a woman — turns and reveals the “white-boned skull of a horse” beneath her long dark hair.

“By the time they scream,” Givhan writes, “it’s too late.”

La Siguanaba is a cautionary tale and a myth to some in El Valle. She is a ghost story to keep the kids safe and away from danger, but to Mal, she is very real. La Siguanaba comes to her in dreams; in her waking hours, she lurks just beyond the light. Her smell — something like urine and unmucked stables — floats on the wind, acting like a warning, a memory, a message.

But all this — the monster in the shadows, the missing daughters and even a rising tension in El Valle over a lithium plant and a looming ecological disaster — is only part of the story. Mal can only know so much, and it is through the details revealed by Mal’s daughters, Amaranta and Griselda, that we begin to comprehend the depth of this story.

Like all good mysteries, there is a whole world just out of reach: secret lives, secrets kept, secrets used like currency. For us — the readers — the clues are there. Givhan does a wonderful job infusing the early pages with hints and observations from each of the three perspectives, Mal, Amaranta and Griselda, all of whom are hiding things from each other.

To the reader, who benefits from the combined knowledge of these characters, each perspective adds a different lens. Mal, with her mother’s intuition and almost otherworldly connection to La Siguanaba, Amaranta, who is the youngest and still very much a child and who sees what others don’t expect her to, and then Griselda, home from college, who looks on all of this with a fresh, almost outside perspective. All of them come to the same conclusion very early on: Something is very off in this small community.

“Salt Bones” is a worthy read. It’s a book infused with the language and culture of a strong Mexican American and Indigenous community. In some way, like La Siguanaba, it’s a conduit into another world. A complicated, real and very much welcome, if a bit scary, world.

And though the layering of information — of what we know, what remains hidden from us and what has been foreshadowed — does add up (delaying what becomes a propulsive search for the missing in the second half of the novel), Givhan’s talents as a writer of blunt, strong sentences and remarkable poetic passages regarding the landscape and the sea more than make up for any delay.

“Salt Bones” is a triumph. One of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing that I’ve read in some time. And it is certainly a book that will haunt you (in a good way!) for a very long time after you’ve turned the final page.

Waite is the author of four novels and a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.

“It’s 1997 all over again. Isn’t that nostalgic?” Freddie Prinze Jr. says to fellow millennial heartthrob Jennifer Love Hewitt in this fittingly silly resurrection of the B-movie slasher franchise “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” In the ’90s original, based on the young adult novel of the same name by Lois Duncan, Prinze and Hewitt played Ray and Julie, the sole survivors of a teen clique that accidentally runs over a stranger, conceals the crime and then, one year later, needs to flee a hook-wielding avenger over the Fourth of July weekend. Having endured that escapade and a sequel that chased them to the Bahamas, the duo is back for this mildly meta installment to mentor a new generation of manslaughterers. A mysterious raincoat-clad killer has a point when a message in blood is smeared: You can’t evade the past.

The five youngsters fleeing the inevitable are sensible Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and her bland ex-boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), daffy blond Danica (Madelyn Cline) and her rich fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and hard luck Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), who just got out of rehab. Slightly older than their forebearers were during their misadventure, they’re all in their early 20s and launching their adult lives when they repeat the same deadly mistake on the same night, on the same stretch of coastal road in Southport, North Carolina. Danica groans, “It’s called Reaper’s Curve for a reason.”

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s perky update has a few things going for it, including low expectations. Co-written with former journalist Sam Lansky, this horror throwback just wants to get some giggles at the mall, even cracking a joke about Nicole Kidman’s beloved AMC ad. Robinson, who created MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious” and has helped shepherd a handful of other fluffy amusements, is a promising popcorn wit, deftly ensuring the tone is neither too sober nor too snide. You don’t feel that guilty gobbling her empty calories.

Robinson seems to respect the first film as though she was adapting Proust. Perhaps to people of a certain age who grew up watching it on VHS at slumber parties, it is their madeleine. The script works in as many callbacks as possible: spooky mannequins under plastic sheeting, tacky parade floats with giant fiberglass clams, Hewitt hollering her memorable line: “What are you waiting for?” (And there’s a big cameo that deserves to be a surprise.) The gags feel klutzier when they aim for 21st century humor — say, Hewitt sipping tea from a mug that reads “tears of the patriarchy.”

This latest cast was all born around the time of the ’90s massacre and are oblivious to the murder spree yet to come. Callow Teddy even makes fun of the name on one of the dead kids’ graves: “Barry Cox,” he snorts. Powerful land developers like Teddy’s dad (Billy Campbell) also buried information about the previous attacks. The forces of real estate and the local police department have invested heavily in transforming this blue-collar fishing hamlet into a tony beach resort. Even before bodies get strung up on the pier like sharks, you’re thinking that the writers must have also dug out their VHS tapes of “Jaws.”

Pragmatic, good-hearted Ava is the film’s moral center, the one disgusted enough to realize that she, her friends and Southport’s leadership are all cretins. Chase Sui Wonders has been strong in everything I’ve seen her in — I’m watching her career with curiosity — even if here, she mostly expresses her foul mood by changing her wardrobe from slime green to black. Ava’s ex Milo seems like a role that should amount to more than it does. All there is to know about him is that he’s alleged to work in politics and he and Ava have zero heat.

But we come to love Ava’s BFF Danica, who prances into obvious death traps wearing flimsy silver mules. She’s a walking cupcake — in this genre, a disposable-seeming treat — yet the way Madelyn Cline plays her is fabulous. This bohemian is as shallow as they come, fretting that the stress is giving her alopecia and suggesting her professional empath for guidance. (Danica also has a life coach, an energy healer and a psychic.) With her soft cheeks and tearful, raspy baby voice, it’s shocking how much we get attached to her. Gratefully, Robinson clearly loves her characters too and makes their screen time count rather than treating them like grindhouse fodder, that kind of violent vaudeville where you can’t wait for the hook to drag someone off screaming.

The film’s strongest move is that it encourages us to like (and laugh at) our victims. Nearly all of them — Milo excepted — are interesting, especially a true crime podcaster named Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel, a scenery-chewing delight) who calls Southport’s cover-up a case of “gentrifi-slay-tion.” When this ghoulish fangirl escorts Ava to a historic murder scene and starts to unbutton her top, you’re convinced that she finds all this bloodshed a turn-on. Another target, played by a fratty Joshua Orpin, tries to bribe the killer with crypto.

Let’s be frank: None of these characters, past or present, would have grown up to be rocket scientists. The original got through its gore scenes with grim brutishness, like it was embarrassed that they had to be done. Written by Kevin Williamson, the talent behind the clever slasher “Scream” and the earnest romance “Dawson’s Creek,” it couldn’t quite capture the best elements of both. Robinson has more fun playing executioner. Each death is given a satisfying buildup; she’s a skilled hook-tease. One muscular kid who’s been pumping up to defend himself lets out an excited war whoop when it’s finally time to fight for his life.

The score, camerawork and editing are simply fine. They’re not trying to pull focus from the dialogue, which is genuinely funny. (My favorite design choice was the clodding sound of the killer’s boots when they come tromping in for the coup de grâce.) But the plotting barely keeps pace. Characters wander away for bizarre stretches of time. Just when I thought things were losing steam, someone got menaced in an actual steam room.

Robinson is more interested in pranking us with psych-outs than sinister scares. She’s under palpable pressure to execute a twist, so several scenes feel like a magician flipping over the wrong card to distract you from the right one tucked in their sleeve. You don’t quite buy the big reveal. Yet quibbling would seem as tweedy as arguing that the film is peddling both nostalgia and anemoia — a longing for an era one never knew firsthand. This recycled trash is no treasure, but I’m betting the majority of this redo’s audience will be young enough to find ’90s-style schlock adorably quaint.