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The twisted tale of two best friends in Troy, Missouri — that ended in the ultimate backstabbing for insurance money — is at the heart of NBC’s new limited series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8. Two-time Oscar winner Renée Zellweger made headlines for her head-turning transformation into Hupp thanks to layers of prosthetics, and the star-studded ensemble cast including Judy Greer, Josh Duhamel, Katy Mixon, and Glenn Fleshler round out the very “Fargo”-esque series....

Ready to get into the holiday spirit? The first two episodes of “Hawkeye,” starring Jeremy Renner as the highly skilled archer and ex-Avenger, premiered exclusively on Disney+ November 24. The series is set in post-blip New York City where Clint Barton (a.k.a. Hawkeye) is on a mission to get back to his family for Christmas. His holiday wish gets complicated when a threat from the past comes knocking. Reluctantly, Hawkeye teams up with Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) — a 22-year-old archer and his biggest fan — to help him unravel a criminal conspiracy....

“With all of our movies, it’s something that we think about a lot, making female characters feel like real women, as opposed to a female character that fits into a formula that everybody is comfortable with,” Hart said in a recent interview with IndieWire. While other films and filmmakers might be hung up on building stories around easily digestible and readily recognizable formulas, Hart and Horowitz relish the chance to bring more authentic stories to the screen, the kind that don’t feel like anything else....

“I think the reception from an audience perspective would be very similar [if it was released today],” Elba said. “But considering the social climate now, ‘Beasts of No Nation’ would certainly make a real impact in terms of awards and accolades, and not just because of the climate but because of Cary’s great film. A film like ‘Beasts’ at that juncture [in 2015] was being ignored for many reasons. But you wouldn’t be able to ignore it in this climate....

“Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself” is impossible to neatly categorize. Part monologue, part magic show, part a journey for DelGaudio to discover — and simultaneously deconstruct — his own identity, the Hulu film is a wholly engrossing artistic experiment. Such was also the case with the 500-plus live performances that culminated in DelGaudio’s film adaptation for Hulu, which premiered in January. DelGaudio noted that the film used scenes from his numerous stage shows and said that the ability to include multiple perspectives and versions of the same routine in the film made for a project that differentiated itself from the live performance while championing its most important elements....

With the over-crowded documentary awards field, being seen is the first order. Box-office buzz is not a factor in this pandemic year, which gives deep-pocketed distributors like NatGeo an advantage. It has a long list of strong, widely seen contenders that yielded two of the eight PGA nominations: Thai cave thriller “The Rescue” and COVID diary “The First Wave.” HBO also landed two nominees, Nanfu Wang’s portrait of China during COVID, “In the Same Breath,” and Megan Mylan’s Syrian migrant documentary “Simple As Water....

But, as the writing process progressed, Scheinert and partner Daniel Kwan ended up retooling the script and making Evelyn the film’s protagonist, opening the door for Yeoh to carry the film. “We were having trouble figuring out the casting for the father figure, and one of us started wondering what happens if we take Michelle’s character and flop it and she becomes the protagonist,” Kwan said. “And the film just opened up in a completely different way....