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Though it’s set in 14th century France, the film explores timely #MeToo themes. Based on Eric Jager’s “The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France,” the story centers around the last judicial duel to occur in the country — where one man was judged against the other in a deadly trial of swords. The duel is staged in response to the alleged rape of Marguerite de Carrouges (Comer) by Jacques Le Gris (Driver) and occurs after Jean de Carrouges (Damon) accuses Le Gris of the crime....

The second episode of “The Mandalorian” Season 2 is… fine. That’s probably not what fans of Disney’s mega-budget “Star Wars” series are hoping for, but for all of the show’s endless hype, teases, and the boundless possibilities allowed by the franchise’s storied history, “The Passenger” is just more of the same. Here’s the plot: The Mandalorian is ambushed in a desert by some bad guys who want to take The Child, aka Baby Yoda (in stores now!...

That Clooney’s “Midnight Sky” would resemble Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning adventure epic “The Revenant” is not by accident, as the project was written by “Revenant” screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Clooney stars in the film as Augustine, a cancer-stricken scientist who ties to prevent a group of astronauts from returning to Earth after a global catastrophe wipes out the planet. Augustine and a child named Iris (Caoilinn Springall) are the last survivors....

While it’s true that Don Draper (née Dick Whitman) was a human disappearing act with a flair for reinvention and a surplus of the god-like confidence required to pull off a mid-air heist, it’s hard to imagine a less satisfying or plausible conclusion to one of the century’s most unpredictable shows. Of course, it’s possible that such unpredictability is the very thing that inspired certain fans to entertain such ridiculous theories; the further the final season moved away from convention, the more some people twisted the evidence into an understandable explanation — like a sleeping brain trying to organize a mess of neuronal soup into the narrative of a dream....

For fans of the HBO series “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” and even the podcast “Sword and Scale,” both unsparing their detailing of grisly crimes, “The Ripper” is an endlessly grim source of fascination. It also effectively flays a procedural breakdown within the police force, showing that the pile-up of misinformation surrounding the deaths of 13 women could be as maddening as the murders themselves. Directed by Jesse Vile and Ellena Wood, “The Ripper” weaves present-day talking heads with impressively edited, grainy archival footage and period-specific reenactments as convincing as any documentary-aping fake-out this side of Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell....

New book “It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO,” by Felix Gillette and John Koblin, revealed that initially “HBO executives didn’t like the name since it sounded like a show about opera,” and the pilot for Emmy-winning “The Sopranos” scored poorly with the core demographics. Former HBO executive Chris Albrecht noted that the biggest emphasis for the long-running mafia series was authenticity, including being filmed on location in New Jersey....

“You use the tools that you bring with telling a movie story,” said Imbert, a former animation supervisor who teamed up with producers Didier Brunner (“Ernest & Celestine,” “The Triplets of Belleville”), Damien Brunner, Jean-Charles Ostorero (who co-scripted), and Stéphan Roelants. “And that’s why we use image, sound design, and music [by Amine Bouhafa] to create something that doesn’t exist outside. Of course, I know and love some animation a lot, but most of my influences are live-action movies....