“I really chased this project,” said Ivanov in an interview with IndieWire. “I had read the book in 2017 and was quite taken with it, [even] the front cover graphics. It’s a really well-thought-out book. When I heard it was coming together for HBO, I pestered my agent and said, ‘We gotta go for this.’” That pestering paid off, as Ivanov would land the challenging project by showing how it needed to go far beyond designing a single look for the series as whole....

The opening scene of “Lovecraft Country” is an actual nightmare, as series protagonist Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors), is haunted by ghosts from his past as a soldier in the Korean war trenches. It’s a fantasy sequence filled with flying saucers, octopuses with dragon-like wings, reddish alien life forms beaming down from spacecrafts, and Jackie Robinson at bat, except he’s swinging at indescribable monsters that ooze green slime. It’s a chaotic jumble that, on its surface makes very little sense, but such is the nature of dreams....

Shelton broke out of the Seattle film scene with her lo-fi comedy “My Effortless Brilliance” in 2008. Appreciation for her naturalistic style grew around her poignant character studies like “Humpday,” “Your Sister’s Sister,” and “Laggies,” but she spent the past decade navigating the larger arena of TV production, with directing credits that ranged from “Mad Men” to “New Girl” and “GLOW,” the latter of which was one of several collaborations with her romantic partner, Marc Maron....

Garland, ever the boldly-going screenwriter of films like “The Beach” and “28 Days Later” and director of decidedly uncommercial visions like “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina,” has made his most bewildering, inscrutable film yet. He’s also aware of the terrain he’s dipping into in telling an extremely contemporary horror story about the terror of public spaces women are forced to navigate. That setting, here, is the English countryside, and that woman is Jessie Buckley, playing a cipher of a person named Harper in a kind of one-woman horror show where she is the final girl from start to finish....

Wright stars in the film as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and author who writes a satirical novel under a pseudonym, aiming to lay bare the hypocrisies of the publishing world. The book’s immediate success forces Monk to get deeper enmeshed in his assumed identity and challenges his closely held worldviews. In addition to Wright, the film will star “Black-ish” actress Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, “This Is Us” alum Sterling K....

Of course, critics have long accused Emmerich of lowering the bar with his destructive brand of blockbuster schlock, and if the world keeps getting worse at its current rate, I suppose it’s possible that people might eventually look back at “Moonfall” with the same “we don’t know how good we had it” wistfulness that fills my heart every time I watch Randy Quaid fly his little plane up the butthole of that massive alien warship....

Imbuing the lavish period delights of “Mrs. Maisel” with a lively post-menopausal heroine “Hacks” made trendy, “Mrs. Harris” goes down like a sugary amuse-bouche of entertainment — it won’t make a lasting impression but it’s the perfect thing for the moment. The movie begins in 1957 London, where Mrs. Ada Harris (Manville) has finally received word, after years of holding out hope, that her dear Eddie was killed in action some dozen years prior....