review

Once upon a time, PBS was virtually the only portal through which British mysteries came to America. Jeremy Brett‘s peerless Sherlock Holmes, two flavors of Miss Marple, David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw successively as Adam Dalgliesh, “Inspector Morse” and its prequel “Endeavour,” Michael Gambon in “Maigret,” Helen Mirren in “Prime Suspect,” “Rumpole of the Bailey,” “Foyle’s War,” the Benedict Cumberbatch contemporized “Sherlock,” Alec Guinness in John LeCarre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Wallander” with Kenneth Branagh — classics, all. With the rise of cable, as channels looked abroad for content, there was eventually competition for shows, and in the streaming environment, with BritBox and Acorn TV wholly devoted to bringing U.K. content to the U.S., there is even more.

Meanwhile, PBS, which used to run “Mystery!” under its own flag, now has it booked as part of “Masterpiece.” Yet it still nabs some genre gems, often with something conceptually extra, recently including the meta “Magpie Murders” and its sequel, “Moonflower Murders.” Now comes “Patience,” an ingratiating episodic series premiering Sunday, whose title character, played by Ella Maisy Purvis, is autistic (as is Purvis herself).

Adapted by Matt Baker from the French series “Astrid et Raphaëlle,” it stars Purvis as Patience Evans, a civilian clerk working in the seemingly uninhabited and endless archives of the York police department, where, by wheeling some shelves together, she has fashioned herself a little fortress of solitude in which she hides out with some pet mice. In the opening two-part episode, she detects a pattern linking a new and old murder, which brings her into the orbit of detective inspector Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser), her juniors Jake Hunter (Nathan Welsh) and Will Akbari (Ali Ariaie) and their boss Calvin Baxter, played by Mark Benton, whom BritBox watchers will recognize from “Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators,” if considerably cleaned up and a little lighter.

While Bea sees the merits of bringing Patience into the investigation, Jake rejects her, both as an outsider and as “temperamentally unsuitable for this kind of work,” though — spoiler alert — he will come around. (It’s a friendly show.) “I don’t care if she’s autistic,” says detective Bea, “I just care if she’s right.” (She is — mostly.) For her part, Patience tells Bea, “Your deductive leaps of logic can be haphazard and your notes are cursory,” but she admires her clearance rate, the best in the country.

Whether diagnosed (or diagnosable) or not, the quirky sleuth has been a feature of detective fiction since Holmes first whipped out a magnifying glass. Fans and scholars have retrospectively diagnosed the character as being on the spectrum, and you can easily find essays and discussions as to whether Poirot’s fastidiousness at least borders on OCD. There are arguments pro and con, but some fraction of the neurodivergent community is happy to claim them as their own. In this century, television has given us “Monk,” “Bones,” “Professor T.” (also via PBS, and streaming from the website), the ongoing “Ludwig” and broadcast shows “Will Trent,” “Elsbeth” and “High Potential,” with heroes whose preternatural, if not pathological, focus amounts to a superpower. (Diane Kruger’s Det. Sonya Cross on FX’s “The Bridge,” is often held up as particularly true to life.) Of course, all fictional detectives, whether social, antisocial or introverted, tend to be superhuman to some degree, whatever personal challenges they might face, with a more original, more acute perception than their colleagues. That’s why we love them.

Billy Thompson (Connor Curren) leads an autism support group that Patience (Ella Maisy Purvis) attends.

(Eagle Eye Drama / Toon Aerts)

The opening episodes offer a primer in autism, conducted mainly by Patience’s godfather, retired Det. Douglas Gilmour (Adrian Rawlins), with whom she lives, and Billy Thompson (Connor Curren), who leads an autism support group. (Curren is also autistic.) If it’s a little on the money in terms of dialogue, it’s useful information given that many are aware of autism without knowing much about it — it shows up more on TV because it shows up more in the zeitgeist, and screenwriters are always looking for a new angle. (It’s especially welcome here, given the ignorant remarks of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of health, on the causes and experiences of autism.) Still, the neurotypical viewer might wonder how accurately the series portrays neurodivergence, and indeed, within the community, which is nothing like homogeneous, one finds a multiplicity of views. (The series has already shown in the U.K.) That Purvis, now 21 and diagnosed at 17, is herself autistic, suggests that, while she’s playing someone other than herself, the series is to some degree true to her own experience.

Patience carries two umbrellas in case one breaks. (It rains a lot in England, you know.) Building up to approaching Bea, she writes out what she wants to say in a conversational flow chart. She won’t cross a “police line, do not cross” tape unless ushered through and she jumps from an elevator as soon as it becomes too crowded (and exceeds its legal capacity). She’s incapable of small talk (“Are you just being polite or do you really want to know?” she asks Bea, when Bea asks how she is), but does point out that Bea’s socks are mismatched and tells cute forensic specialist Elliot Scott (Tom Lewis) that “Your surname’s a first name and your first name’s a surname,” though, to be picky about it, both names are first names and surnames. Still, it’s the beginning of something.

The mysteries are of the usual unusual sort common to cozy mysteries. (They can be a little sillier than they’re meant to, but it’s not fatal.) Why are apparently happy men killing themselves, on the fourth Friday of the month? One, set in a natural history museum, involves fossils; there’s a locked room mystery (with a mystery writer for a victim), which delights Patience, an Agatha Christie fan, and there’s a corpse that seemingly walks off a table in the morgue. Patience, who cannot resist an unsolved puzzle, is drawn reluctantly out of her shell, and Bea begins to notice things in her young son Alfie (an impressively individual Maxwell Whitelock) that remind her of Patience.

There are times when characters act less than reasonably, or less intelligently than their official position might indicate. If Patience is fast in making calculations and connections, the others can seem slow off the mark, and although everyone is on the case — in cop shows, teamwork typically makes the dream work — she makes the breakthroughs that lead to a solution. Of course, the very logic of the series demands she be invaluable, and in this regard, it’s no different from most mystery series, where one character is out ahead of everyone else in solving the crime.

Not everything makes perfect, or even imperfect, sense. But as always, the plots are there almost as a pretext to spend time with the characters, and the whole cast is good company. But Purvis especially, in spite of Patience’s self-containment, radiates quiet charisma — new-star power. A second season, happily, is already on the cards.

Temba Bavuma avoids being dismissed lbw by Josh Hazlewood after a review shows a surprising spike on the Ultra-edge, with South Africa 66-4 in their first innings in the Test Championship final against Australia at Lord’s.

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Australia says the plan to deliver nuclear submarines remains unchanged, despite opposition to the pact from a top Trump official.

Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles said he is “very confident” that the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom will continue to move forward despite news that the Pentagon is reviewing the 2021 deal between the three nations.

News of the review was first reported on Thursday as US defence officials said re-assessing the pact was necessary to ensure that the military deal, agreed to with much fanfare under former US President Joe Biden, was in line with US President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.

The pact includes a deal worth hundreds of billions of dollars to provide Australia with closely-guarded nuclear propulsion technology. Only five other countries besides the US can build nuclear submarines: the UK, China, Russia, France and India.

“The meetings that we’ve had with the United States have been very positive in respect of AUKUS,” Defence Minister Marles told the ABC network.

A review of the deal is “something that it’s perfectly natural for an incoming administration to do … It’s exactly what we did”, Marles said.

“There is a plan here. We are sticking to it, and we’re going to deliver it,” he said.

Under the terms of the AUKUS deal, Australia and the UK will work with the US to design nuclear-class submarines ready for delivery to Australia in the 2040s, according to the US Naval Institute.

The three countries are already close military allies and share intelligence, but AUKUS focuses on key strategic areas, such as countering the rise of China and its expansion into the Pacific.

Due to the long lead time in building the submarines under the AUKUS deal, Australia also agreed to buy up to three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines during the 2030s. The US and UK also plan to start the rotational deployment of their submarines out of Australia in 2027.

But some Trump administration officials, such as Pentagon policy adviser Elbridge Colby, say the submarine deal puts foreign governments ahead of US national security.

“My concern is why are we giving away this crown jewel asset when we most need it?” Colby said last year.

Other officials, including US Representative Joe Courtney from Connecticut – a US state which has an industry focused on building submarines for the US Navy – say the deal is in the “best interest of all three AUKUS nations, as well as the Indo-Pacific region as a whole”.

“To abandon AUKUS – which is already well under way – would cause lasting harm to our nation’s standing with close allies and certainly be met with great rejoicing in Beijing,” Courtney said.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to discuss the deal when he meets Trump next week during a meeting of the G7 leaders in Canada.

Earlier this year, Australia made a $500m payment towards AUKUS and plans to spend $2bn this year to speed up the production process in the US of the Virginia-class submarines.

The UK, like Australia, has downplayed concerns that the Trump administration could renege on the pact.

A UK official told the Reuters news agency that the deal is “one of the most strategically important partnerships in decades” that will also produce “jobs and economic growth in communities across all three nations”.

“It is understandable that a new administration would want to review its approach to such a major partnership, just as the UK did last year,” the official said.

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1. Your job may be affected

2. More free school meals

3. Better libraries and pools, but higher council tax

4. £3 bus fare cap will continue

5. More help for pensioners in winter

6. Changes to your energy bill

7. More affordable homes

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PA Media

Could Stormont get a bigger top-up?

Saturday afternoon out west and evening back east, as citizens faced off against ICE agents in the streets of Los Angeles, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s 2005 dramatic film tribute to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, became a Major Television Event, broadcast live from Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater, by CNN and Max. That it was made available free to anyone with an internet connection, via the CNN website, was a nice gesture to theater fans, Clooney stans and anyone interested to see how a movie about television translates into a play about television.

The broadcast is being ballyhooed as historic, the first time a play has been aired live from Broadway. And while there is no arguing with that fact, performances of plays have been recorded onstage before, and are being so now. It’s a great practice; I wish it were done more often. At the moment, PBS.org is streaming recent productions of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate!,” the Bob Dylan-scored “Girl From the North Country,” David Henry Hwang‘s “Yellow Face” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning mental health rock musical “Next to Normal.” Britain’s National Theater at Home subscription service offers a wealth of classical and modern plays, including Andrew Scott’s one-man “Vanya,” as hot a ticket in New York this spring as Clooney’s play. And the archives run deep; that a trip to YouTube can deliver you Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” or “Sunday in the Park With George” with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters is a gift not to be overlooked.

Clooney, with co-star Anthony Edwards, had earlier been behind a live broadcast of “Ambush,” the fourth season opener of “ER” as a throwback to the particular seat-of-your-pants, walking-on-a-wire energy of 1950s television. (It was performed twice, once for the East and once for the West Coast.) That it earned an audience of 42.71 million, breaking a couple of records in the bargain, suggests that, from a commercial perspective, it was not at all a bad idea. (Reviews were mixed, but critics don’t know everything.)

Like that episode, the “live” element of Saturday’s broadcast was essentially a stunt, though one that ensured, at least, that no post-production editing has been applied, and that if anyone blew a line, or the house was invaded by heckling MAGA hats, or simply disrupted by audience members who regarded the enormous price they paid for a ticket as a license to chatter through the show, it would presumably have been part of the broadcast. None of that happened — but, it could have! (Clooney did stumble over “simple,” but that’s all I caught.) And, it offered the groundlings at home the chance to see a much-discussed, well-reviewed production only a relatively few were able to see in person — which I applaud on principal and enjoyed in practice — and which will very probably not come again, not counting the next day’s final performance.

Glenn Fleshler, left, plays Fred Friendly in the stage production, a role that George Clooney performed in the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

(Emilio Madrid)

The film, directed by Clooney and co-written with Grant Heslov (who co-wrote the stage version as well), featured the actor as producer and ally Fred W. Friendly to David Strathairn’s memorable Murrow. Here, a more aggressive Clooney takes the Murrow role, while Glenn Fleshler plays Friendly. Released during the second term of the Bush administration, the movie was a meditation on the state of things through the prism of 1954 (and a famous framing speech from 1958 about the possibilities and potential failures of television), the fear-fueled demagoguery of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Murrow’s determination to take him on. (The 1954 “See It Now” episode, “A Report on Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” helped bring about his end.) As in the film, McCarthy is represented entirely through projected film clips, echoing the way that Murrow impeached the senator with his own words.

It’s a combination of political and backstage drama — with a soupcon of office romance, represented by the secretly married Wershbas (Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson) — even more hermetically set within the confines of CBS News than was the film. It felt relevant in 2005, before the influence of network news was dissolved in the acid of the internet and an administration began assaulting the legitimate press with threats and lawsuits; but the play’s discussions of habeas corpus, due process, self-censoring media and the both-sides-ism that seems increasingly to afflict modern media feel queasily contemporary. “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument,” says Clooney’s Murrow to his boss, William F. Paley (an excellent Paul Gross, from the great “Slings & Arrows”). As was shown here, Murrow offered McCarthy equal time on “See It Now” — which he hosted alongside the celebrity-focused “Person to Person,” represented by an interview with Liberace — but it proved largely a rope for the senator to hang himself.

Though modern stage productions, with their computer-controlled modular parts, can replicate the rhythms and scene changes of a film, there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story. It’s an illusion of life, stitched together from bits and pieces. A stage play proceeds in real time and offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will. What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic. It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.

Clooney, whose furrowed brow is a good match for Murrow’s, did not attempt to imitate him, or perhaps did within the limits of theatrical delivery; he was serious and effective in the role if not achieving the quiet perfection of Strathairn’s performance. Scott Pask‘s set was an ingenious moving modular arrangement of office spaces, backed by a control room, highlighted or darkened as needs be; a raised platform stage left supported the jazz group and vocalist, which, as in the movie, performed songs whose lyrics at times commented slyly on the action. Though television squashed the production into two dimensions, the broadcast nevertheless felt real and exciting; director David Comer let the camera play on the players, rather than trying for a cinematic effect through an excess of close-ups and cutaways.

While the play generally followed the lines of the film, there was some rearrangement of scenes, reassignment of dialogue — it was a streamlined cast — and interpolations to make a point, or more directly pitch to 2025. New York news anchor Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg, very moving in the only role with an emotional arc) described feeling “hijacked … as if all the reasonable people went to Europe and left us behind,” getting a big reaction. One character wondered about opening “the door to news with a dash of commentary — what happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?” A rapid montage of clips tracking the decay of TV news and politics — including Obama’s tan suit kerfuffle and the barring of AP for not bowing to Trump’s Gulf of America edit and ending with Elon Musk’s notorious straight-arm gesture, looking like nothing so much as a Nazi salute — was flown into Clooney’s final speech.

Last but not least, there is the audience, your stand-ins at the Winter Garden Theatre, which laughed at the jokes and applauded the big speeches, transcribed from Murrow’s own. And then, the curtain call, to remind you that whatever came before, the actors are fine, drinking in your appreciation and sending you out happy and exhilarated and perhaps full of hope.

A CNN roundtable followed to bring you back to Earth.

Sean Byrne knows how to show an audience a bad time. Sixteen years ago, the Australian filmmaker launched onto the scene with “The Loved Ones,” his proudly grisly debut about a misfit teenager who gets gruesome revenge on the boy who refused to go to prom with her. Part expert torture porn, part exploration of adolescent romantic anxieties, the film was an instant midnight-madness cult item that took Byrne six years to follow up.

When he did, he went in a different tonal direction with “The Devil’s Candy,” a surprisingly emotional psychological thriller about a heavy-metal-loving painter who moves his family to a beautifully rustic home, only to lose his mind. Working in recognizable horror subgenres, Byrne entices you with a familiar premise and then slowly teases apart the tropes, leaving you unsettled but also invigorated by his inventiveness.

It has now been a decade since that distinctive riff on “The Shining,” and for Byrne’s third feature, he once again pillages from indelible sources. “Dangerous Animals” draws from both the serial-killer thriller and Hollywood’s penchant for survival stories about hungry sharks feasting on human flesh. But unlike in the past, Byrne’s new movie never waylays you with a surprise narrative wrinkle or unexpected thematic depth. He hasn’t lost his knack for generating bad vibes, but this time he hasn’t brought anything else to the party.

The movie stars Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, a solitary surfer who explains in on-the-nose dialogue that she prefers the danger of open water to the unhappiness of life on land. An American in Australia who grew up in foster homes and who lives in a beat-up old van, Zephyr encounters Moses (Josh Heuston), a straitlaced nice guy whom she hooks up with. Not that she wants him developing feelings for her: She takes off in the middle of the night so she can catch some waves. Unfortunately, Zephyr is the one who gets caught — by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a deceptively gregarious boat captain who kidnaps her. Next thing she knows, she’s chained up inside his vessel out at sea, alongside another female victim, Heather (Ella Newton).

Like many a movie serial killer, Tucker isn’t just interested in murdering his prey — he wants to make something artistic out of his butchery. And so he ties Heather to a crane and dangles her in the water like a giant lure, pulling out a camcorder to record her final moments as sharks devour her. Watching his victims struggle to stay alive is cinema to this twisted soul and Zephyr will be his next unwitting protagonist.

Working from a script by visual artist Nick Lepard, Byrne (who wrote his two previous features) digs into the story’s B-movie appeal. Tucker may use old-fashioned technology to record his kills, but “Dangerous Animals” is set in the present, even if its trashy, drive-in essence would have made it better suited to come out 50 years ago as counterprogramming to “Jaws.” With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.

But despite that juicy setup, “Dangerous Animals” is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped. There are still subversive ideas — for one thing, this is a shark film with precious few sharks — but Byrne’s sneaky smarts have largely abandoned him. Rather than transcending expectations, “Dangerous Animals” surrenders to them.

One can’t fault Harrison, whose Zephyr spends much of the movie in a battle of wills with her captor. Because “Dangerous Animals” limits the amount of sharks we see, digitally inserting footage of the deadly creatures into scenes, the story’s central tension comes from Zephyr trying to free herself or get help before Tucker prepares his next nautical snuff film. Harrison projects a ferocious determination that’s paired with an intense loathing for this condescending, demented misogynist. It’s bad enough that Tucker wants to murder her — beforehand, he wants to bore her with shark trivia, dully advocating for these misunderstood animals. It’s an underdeveloped joke: “Dangerous Animals” is a nightmare about meeting the mansplainer from hell.

Alas, Courtney’s conception of the film’s true dangerous animal is where the story truly runs aground. The actor’s handsome, vaguely blank countenance is meant to suggest a burly, hunky everyman — the sort of person you’d never suspect or look twice at, which makes Tucker well-positioned to leave a trail of corpses in his path. But neither Byrne nor Courtney entirely gets their arms around this conventionally unhinged horror villain. “Dangerous Animals” overly underlines its point that we shouldn’t be afraid of sharks — it’s the Tuckers who ought to keep us up at night — but Courtney never captures the unfathomable malice beneath the facial scruff. We root for Zephyr to escape Tucker’s clutches not because he’s evil but because he’s a bit of a stiff.

Even with those deficiencies, the film boasts a level of craft that keeps the story fleet, with Byrne relying on the dependable tension of a victim trapped at sea with her pursuer, sharks waiting in the waters surrounding her. Michael Yezerski’s winkingly emphatic score juices every scare as the gore keeps ratcheting up — particularly during a moment when Zephyr finds an unexpected way to break out of handcuffs.

But Byrne can’t redeem the script’s boneheaded plot twists, nor can he elevate the most potentially intriguing idea at its core. As Tucker peers into his viewfinder, getting off on his victims’ screams as sharks sink their jaws into them, “Dangerous Animals” hints at the fixation horror directors such as Byrne have for presenting us with unspeakable terrors, insisting we love the bloodshed as much as they do. Tucker tries to convince Zephyr that they’re not all that different — they’re both sharks, you see — but in truth, Byrne may be suggesting an uncomfortable kinship with his serial killer. But instead of provocatively pursuing that unholy bond, the director only finds chum.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that, alongside everything else that’s crowding your news brain right now, deforestation in the Amazon is still a massive crisis for the planet, one that is fast reaching a point of no return regarding our ability to curtail its terrible impact.

Movies love superheroes that take on their villains with big-stage swagger. But documentaries thrive on underdogs and when it comes to standing up to the illegal logging and mining that’s flattening South America’s leafy canopy, Indigenous people have more than shown their mettle against buzzing chainsaws or buzzy politicians. The energetic dispatch “We Are Guardians” from directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, is the latest advocacy feature to bring cameras into the Amazon to juxtapose beauty and devastation — as well as a David vs. Goliath battle as it’s experienced on the ground.

We meet soft-spoken family man Marҫal, from the Indigenous territory of Arariboia, whose decades-old group of organized, unpaid, weapons-trained and face-painted “forest guardians” take the fight directly to loggers, wherever they can sneak up on them, at great risk to their lives. (Their foes are armed too.) Though Marçal speaks eloquently of his holistic view of their mission — he’s protecting the water, the trees and the region’s wildlife — he also shows concern that the Amazon’s uncontacted peoples stay free of interference too.

Meanwhile, activist Puyr Tembé from the Alto Rio Guama territory is working hard to get more Indigenous women into politics and in seats of power — a tall order at a time (filming mostly took place between 2019 and 2022) when rapaciously pro-agribusiness Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro openly treated the rights of Indigenous peoples as dismissable and a nuisance. As Tembé articulates, it takes a reforesting of the mind and heart to catalyze progress.

These dedicated warriors certainly earn our admiration in the good/evil binary of the conflict, but complications help give the documentary shape, as in the attention given a crusty logger named Valdir, who agreed to be featured on camera. A logger for over 50 years since he was 8, he knows exactly what’s wrong with his job, but is trapped in the maw of an industry as a means of survival for his family. Even a wealthy landowner can come off like a victim here, as is the case with Tadeu, a businessman who in the 1990s started an ecological sanctuary on his 28,000 hectares, and whose complaints to the Brazilian government about illegal encroachment on his land fall on deaf ears.

There’s a comprehensiveness to how “We Are Guardians” lays out a big, knotty problem of environment, politics, geography and business — internationalized yet hyper-local — while spotlighting the Indigenous push-back efforts. But the movie’s verité style of thumbnail portraiture doesn’t always dovetail neatly with the other elements: the unloading of facts, getting those drone shots in and projecting a thriller-like atmosphere. Coming on the heels of the aesthetically sharp and immersive “The Territory” from a couple years ago (which covers some of the same ground), “We Are Guardians” feels more like a highlighting of issues than a documentary journey that takes you somewhere.

But sometimes, it’s whatever gets out the message, right? When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, “We Are Guardians,” like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.

There’s a wonderfully simple emotional appeal embedded in the opening of “I Don’t Understand You,” a comedy from co-writer-directors Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig. Well-meaning, well-off gay couple Dom and Cole (Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells, respectively) are eager to adopt a baby. In watching them record an appeal video — selling themselves as fit parents to an unknown mother — you want the best for them. It’s a heartrending, nervous-laughter scene: Are they sincere without being desperate? Charming yet not edgy? In between the stops and restarts, they both wittily let off steam about the absurdity of the process.

How hard does it have to be for willing adults in a loving relationship to start a family? That’s where “I Don’t Understand You” devotes its more darkly humorous energies when it sends Dom and Cole to sunny, pastoral Italy for an anniversary trip, dropping them into a series of lethally unfortunate situations that probably only Patricia Highsmith would consider a proper vacation.

Soon after landing in Rome, they’re buoyed by news that a receptive pregnant mother named Candace (Amanda Seyfried via video chat) is touched by their story, their vibe being everything she wants for her baby. It’s a cautious optimism, though, competing with the anxiety Dom and Cole generally feel as gay men on the alert for everyday microaggressions, also as tourists who don’t know the language and urbanites not exactly comfortable navigating another country’s backwaters at night.

That last concern is what kicks off their nightmare, when the couple’s rental car gets stuck on a private road that leads to a remote farmhouse where they have a reservation for an anniversary dinner. A mild panic bubbles up. The gruff, irritable and armed local who shows up only fuels their notion that death is surely around the corner. And it is, just not the way they or we may have imagined when they eventually reach the rustic home of retired restaurateur Francesca (a nonna-authentic Eleonora Romandini) and find a voluble soul who can’t wait to serve her only guests a celebratory candlelit meal.

Subtitles helpfully let us know what the skittish, suspicious Dom and Cole never quite understand about their friendly host. When Francesca’s hulking, inquisitive son Massimo (Morgan Spector) appears, suggestively brandishing a knife, a blunt fiasco of an evening suddenly tips over into a bloody farce of fear-driven misjudgment. Despite the game commitment of everyone on-screen (starting with Kroll and Rannells’ believable portrayal of loving, vulnerable gay marrieds), “I Don’t Understand You” is only sporadically funny.

The writer-directors are themselves a real-life couple who adopted a child, so ostensibly we’re getting an exaggeratedly autobiographical peek into what self-preservation on the cusp of dadhood looks like at its off-the-charts hairiest. And it’s encouraging that the filmmakers opted to turn their experience and its attendant emotions into a silly horror comedy instead of one more earnest social-issue drama. (Amanda Knox is a listed co-producer too, and when the Italian arm of justice gets involved, you’ll understand why.)

Just as its opening triggers hope for its wannabe family men, you want “I Don’t Understand You” to really nail its downward spiral, and yet it’s something of a misfire, albeit a likable one. The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.

Paramount Global chairwoman and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is battling cancer as she tries to steer the media company through a turbulent sales process.

“Shari Redstone was diagnosed with thyroid cancer earlier this spring,” her spokeswoman Molly Morse said late Thursday. “While it has been a challenging period, she is maintaining all professional and philanthropic activities throughout her treatment, which is ongoing.

“She and her family are grateful that her prognosis is excellent,” Morse said.

The news comes nearly 11 months after Redstone agreed to sell Paramount to David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a deal that would end the family’s tenure as major Hollywood moguls after four decades.

However, the government’s review of the sale to Skydance hit a snag amid President Trump’s $20-billion lawsuit against Paramount and its subsidiary CBS over edits to an October “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Redstone, 71, told the New York Times that she underwent surgery last month after receiving the diagnosis about two months ago. Surgeons removed her thyroid gland but did not fully eradicate the cancer, which had spread to her vocal cords, the paper said.

She continues to be treated with radiation, the paper reported.

The Redstone family controls 77% of the voting shares of Paramount. Since Bob Bakish was ousted as chief executive last year, the company has been managed by a trio of executives who share the title of co-chief executive.

Her father, the late Sumner Redstone, built the company into a juggernaut but it has seen its standing slip in recent years. There have been management missteps and pressures brought on by consumers’ shift to streaming. The trend has crimped revenue to companies that own cable channels, including Paramount.

The COVID-19 pandemic followed by the 2023 writers and actors strikes also took a toll on Paramount and the Redstone family’s private firm, National Amusements Inc., which owns movie theaters.

Paramount cut its dividend to shareholders two years ago, leaving the family in a financial bind.

Financial pressures contributed to Redstone’s decision to entertain offers for Paramount and National Amusements, which holds the Paramount shares.

Nearly two years ago, Ellison and Redstone began talks that culminated last July with an agreement on a multi-phased $8-billion deal that would pass the torch to Ellison.

Redstone wants to close the deal. National Amusements would receive $2.4 billion, which would pay its debts and leave the family with more than $1.7 billion.

She has urged the company to settle the lawsuit Trump filed in October, weeks after “60 Minutes” interviewed then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing the interview to make Harris look smarter and improve her election chances, a charge that CBS has denied.

The dispute over the edits has sparked unrest within the company, prompted high-level departures and triggered a Federal Communications Commission examination of alleged news distortion.

The FCC’s review of the Skydance deal has become bogged down. If the agency does not approve the transfer of CBS television station licenses to the Ellison family, the deal could collapse.

The two companies must complete the merger by early October. If not, Paramount will owe a $400-million breakup fee to Skydance.

Redstone, through National Amusements, also owes nearly $400 million to a Chicago banker who loaned the family money in 2023 and tech titan Larry Ellison, who is helping bankroll the buyout of Paramount and National Amusements.

Last week, Paramount nominated three new directors to serve on the company’s board following its July 2 investor meeting.

In a proxy filing, Paramount asked shareholders to expand the board to seven directors, including Redstone and three recruits: attorney Mary Boies (a member of the firm led by her husband David Boies); Silicon Valley venture capital executive Charles E. Ryan; and former Massachusetts trial court judge Roanne Sragow Licht.

They would join longtime board members Linda M. Griego, Susan Schuman and Barbara M. Byrne.

The first film I saw in a theater was “The Love Bug,” Disney’s 1969 comedy about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie and the motley team who race him to many a checkered flag. Although my memory is hazy, I recall my toddler’s delight: a car could think, move and communicate like a real person, even chauffeuring the romantic leads to their honeymoon. Nice Herbie!

Or not so nice. A decade later, Stanley Kubrick opened his virtuosic “The Shining” with fluid tracking shots of the same model of automobile headed toward the Overlook Hotel and a rendezvous with horror. Something had clicked. Caroline Fraser’s scorching, seductive “Murderland” chronicles the serial-killer epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, focusing on her native Seattle and neighboring Tacoma, where Ted Bundy was raised. He drove a Beetle, hunting for prey. She underscores the striking associations between VWs and high-yield predators, as if the cars were accomplices, malevolent Herbies dispensing victims efficiently. (Bundy’s vehicle is now displayed in a Tennessee museum.) The book’s a meld of true crime, memoir and social commentary, but with a mission: to shock readers into a deeper understanding of the American Nightmare, ecological devastation entwined with senseless sadism. “Murderland” is not for the faint of heart, yet we can’t look away: Fraser’s writing is that vivid and dynamic.

She structures her narrative chronologically, conveyed in present tense, newsreel-style, evoking the Pacific Northwest’s woodsy tang and bland suburbia. Fraser came of age on Mercer Island, adjacent to Lake Washington’s eastern shore, across a heavily-trafficked pontoon bridge notorious for fatal crashes. Like the Beetle, the dangerous bridge threads throughout “Murderland,” braiding the author’s personal story with those of her cast. A “Star Trek” geek stuck in a rigid Christian Science family, she loathed her father and longed to escape.

In Tacoma, 35 miles to the south, Ted Bundy grew up near the American Smelting and Refining Co., which disgorged obscene levels of lead and arsenic into the air while netting millions for the Guggenheim dynasty before its 1986 closure. Bundy is the book’s charismatic centerpiece, a handsome, well-dressed sociopath in shiny patent-leather shoes, flitting from college to college, job to job, corpse to corpse. During the 1970s, he abducted dozens of young women, raping and strangling them on sprees across the country, often engaging in postmortem sex before disposing their bodies. He escaped custody twice in Colorado — once from a courthouse and another time from a jail — before he was finally locked up for good after his brutal attacks on Chi Omega sorority sisters at Florida State University.

Fraser depicts his bloody brotherhood with similar flair. Israel Keyes claimed Bundy as a hero. Gary Ridgway, the prolific “Green River Killer,” inhaled the same Puget Sound toxins. Randy Woodfield trawled I-5 in his 1974 Champagne Edition Beetle. As she observes of Richard Ramirez, Los Angeles’ “Night Stalker”: “He’s six foot one, wears black, and never smiles. He has a dead stare, like a shark. He doesn’t bathe. He has bad teeth. He’s about to go beserk.” But the archvillain is ASARCO, the mining corporation that dodged regulations, putting profitability over people. Fraser reveals an uncanny pattern of polluting smelters and the men brought up in their shadows, prone to mood swings and erratic tantrums. The science seems speculative until the book’s conclusion, where she highlights recent data, explicitly mapping links.

Caroline Fraser laments the lack of accountability that the wealthy Guggenheim family has faced for operating a company that spewed toxins in Tacoma air for decades.

(Hal Espen)

Her previous work, “Prairie Fires,” a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, won the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades. The pivot here is dramatic, a bit of formal experimentation as Fraser shatters the fourth wall, luring us from our comfort zone. While rooted in the New Journalism of Joan Didion and John McPhee, “Murderland” deploys a mocking tone to draw us in, scattering deadpan jokes among chapters: “In 1974 there are at least a half a dozen serial killers operating in Washington. Nobody can see the forest for the trees.” Fraser delivers a brimstone sermon worthy of a Baptist preacher at a tent revival, raging at plutocrats who ravage those with less (or nothing at all).

Her fury blazes beyond balance sheets and into curated spaces of elites. She singles out Roger W. Straus Jr., tony Manhattan publisher, patron of the arts and grandson of Daniel Guggenheim, whose Tacoma smelter may have scrambled Bundy’s brain. She mentions Straus’ penchant for ascots and cashmere jackets. She laments the lack of accountability. “Roger W. Straus Jr. completes the process of whitewashing the family name,” she writes. “Whatever the Sackler family is trying to do by collecting art and endowing museums, lifting their skirts away from the hundreds of thousands addicted and killed by prescription opioids manufactured and sold by their company — Purdue Pharma — the Guggenheims have already stealthily and handily accomplished.” Has Fraser met a sacred cow she wouldn’t skewer?

Those beautiful Cézannes and Picassos in the Guggenheim Museum can’t paper over the atrocities; the gilded myths of American optimism, our upward mobility and welcoming shores won’t mask the demons. “The furniture of the past is permanent,” she notes. “The cuckoo clock, the Dutch door, the daylight basement — humble horsemen of the domestic Apocalypse. The VWs, parked in the driveway.” “Murderland” is a superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges, this summer’s premier nonfiction read.

Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

June 4 (UPI) — Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary said he plans to review the safety of abortion drug mifepristone after a recent study raised concerns about medical side effects.

In a letter to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Makary revealed the FDA’s plan on Monday to review the abortion pill after Hawley alerted the commissioner to the study.

“As the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, I am committed to conducting a review of mifepristone and working with the professional career scientists at the agency who review this data,” Makary wrote.

“As with all drugs, FDA continues to closely monitor the postmarketing safety data on mifepristone for the medical termination of early pregnancy,” Makary added.

Hawley referred the FDA commissioner to the recent study, from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which found 11% of women experienced sepsis, infection or hemorrhaging within 45 days of taking the pill.

While Hawley said that information is listed as a side effect for mifepristone, the numbers are 22 times greater than the label warns. The study was based on insurance claims for 865,727 mifepristone abortions between 2017 and 2023.

“I’m calling on the FDA to reinstate safety regulations on the chemical abortion drug immediately. New data out today show a massive number of severe medical side effects,” Hawley said in April. “The time to act is now.”

Makary told senators during his confirmation hearing in March that he would oversee a review of mifepristone, but did not order it until Hawley alerted him to the EPPC study. The FDA commissioner did express concerns earlier this year about the Biden administration’s policy, which allowed women to access abortion drugs without making in-person appointments.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, saying the pro-life doctors who brought the case lacked standing. The court said the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine failed to prove they suffered any harm from the FDA’s policies.

President Donald Trump, who supported the Supreme Court’s decision, was also urged by Hawley to order a mifepristone review over the EPPC’s findings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Macall Polay / HBO)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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