The first, Wilson rookie and Public Theatre director George C. Wolfe’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” will clean up at the Oscars. Even though it’s set in 1920s Chicago, it’s timely in the way that it shows how simmering pain and anguish can explode. Wolfe wisely moved away from winter and leaned into pushing the film’s sweltering heat. Actors will love Oscar winner Viola Davis (“Fences”) as the gold-toothed, hip-swaying, bosomy, sweat-drenched blues singer of the title, and never-nominated Chadwick Boseman (“Black Panther”) as her restless, go-getter trumpeter: he could follow Heath Ledger (“The Dark Knight”) and Peter Finch (“Network”) to win a posthumous Oscar....

Live sports are a major part of a well-rounded entertainment diet, and whether you return to arenas this year or play it safe at home, you can watch baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, college football, and pretty much every other nationally broadcast sport on ESPN+. Not signed up? A subscription to ESPN+ comes with access to live sports and archival games, sure, but more importantly, the sports network’s trove of deeply fascinating “30 for 30” documentaries....

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” made its debut on Thursday. The musical drama is currently playing in movie theaters, but HBO Max subscribers have the option of enjoying the movie from the comfort of home. Based off Miranda’s hit stage musical, “In the Heights” takes place in the vibrant New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights, where a tight-knit community of New Yorkers are busy following their dreams and working toward better lives....

The FX comedy, based on the film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, returned Tuesday for its fourth season, with Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasha Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) reunited at their Staten Island mansion. A year after the Season 3 finale, the vampires and their familiar are going in new directions. Nandor searches for a wife, Guillermo is determined to put himself first, and Nadja focuses her efforts on raising money to repair the crumbling house....

Actress Daisy Edgar-Jones remembers her mother, a prodigious reader, singing the praise of the novel while the family was on holiday in 2020, just months after the book had been optioned for the big screen. “She didn’t tell me that there was a part that actually I was maybe suitable for, which was very funny,” Edgar-Jones said in a recent interview with IndieWire. That part is Kya, known to some as “the marsh girl....

Oscar winner Goldberg portrays Alma Carthan, Emmett Till’s grandmother, in Chinonye Chukwu’s biopic “Till,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival prior to debuting in select theaters October 14. A Daily Beast critic noted Goldberg’s “distracting fat suit” in the role; the review has since deleted the criticism following Goldberg’s clarification. “There was a young lady who writes for one of the magazines, and she was distracted by my fat suit, in her review,” Goldberg said during “The View....

A Wednesday Digiday report suggested that an Apple TV+ AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) tier may “quietly” be in the works. Apple has held “exploratory” talks with executives in the media space, they wrote, touting what the publication described as “an unusual approach to selling ad time.” The whole Digiday story is what’s highly unusual here, one source close to Apple told Indiewire. While Apple TV has ads on its live sports content — the pacing of major sports contests are built around commercial breaks — ads are not coming to other programming, the person said....