There are many times in Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya,” an anxiety-filled potboiler of a documentary about the fight to rescue enslaved girls from ISIS, where one might wonder how they pulled it off. That feeling is quickly followed by relief that they did. The daring on display by Hirori, the 40-year-old Swedish filmmaker who left his native Kurdistan in 1999, is matched and (he’d certainly say) exceeded by the bravery of his subjects: the humanitarian rescuers of the Yazidi Home Center in northern Syria....

Last year, all the SAG Ensemble nominees went on to win Oscars, including SAG winner “Parasite,” which took home Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature for Bong Joon Ho. All the SAG acting winners repeated at the Oscars as well — Renée Zellweger (“Judy”), Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”), Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”), and Laura Dern (“Marriage Story”). Sometimes, SAG isn’t a factor. In 2019, “If Beale Street Could Talk” star Regina King won the Globe, was snubbed by SAG, and went on to win Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars....

“It was very clear from that very first TCA, or whatever we did, people didn’t like her,” said the actress, referencing the presentation the show gave in August 2021 during the Television Critics Association Press Tour. “They didn’t like her and they didn’t think that we liked her, and it seemed to be that they thought we were making a point of doing what most people expected would be the story of Linda....

The question prompted Rogen to discuss the relationship between cancel culture and comedy, as many comedians have been forced to reckon with dated jokes that are no longer appropriate in the present day. Rogen said, “To me when I see comedians complaining about this kind of thing, I don’t understand what they’re complaining about. If you’ve made a joke that’s aged terribly, accept it. And if you don’t think it’s aged terribly, then say that....

This sense of discomfort and disorientation is present already from the opening scene, where we follow Aurora (Noëlle Schönwald), who meets with a white woman and her husband, before stepping into the trunk of their car in complete silence, seemingly afraid of something. There is barely a word spoken in the first 15 minutes of the film, there is no score at all, no relief from the tension, forcing the audience to ponder just what is going on here....

Luckily for Hirway, when it came to the start of each episode of the new “Song Exploder” Netflix documentary series, he already had a solid foundation. Like so many other aspects of the TV project, it was a matter of building on what was already there. “The theme music for the TV show is actually the same opening from the podcast, but with other stuff added on top of it,” Hirway told IndieWire....

Where to Watch ‘South Side’: HBO Max (Season 1 of the series originally aired on Comedy Central.) The middle of Season 2 of “South Side” is one of the better runs that any comedy had last year. Nestled in a pretty magical sophomore season, the show delivered a pair of episodes that speak to how much ground this comedy can cover on a week-to-week basis: one half hour about the very eventful life of a single piece of furniture (one of our picks for 2021’s best) followed by an unhinged sendoff to a legendary Chicago-area party promoter....