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While the movie has been met with mixed reviews, Day’s performance has been routinely hailed as a major breakthrough for the Grammy-nominated singer, who had never played a leading role before in film or TV. In the wake of a recent Golden Globe win and the movie’s Hulu release, she is now on track to score a Best Actress Oscar nomination, making her one of the few late-breaking additions to an awards season that runs into April....

“Animal Wisdom” is a theater piece, in the sense that it’s adapted from the show Christian wrote and mounted for a run at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn back in late 2017. “Animal Wisdom” is a film, in the sense that this particular incarnation was shot over the course of a week spent at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company space in Washington D.C. back in March. It’s also a participatory experience, as much as one can be when performers and audience are separated by months and miles....

Where to Watch ‘Schmigadoon!’: Apple TV+ It’s no surprise that Ariana DeBose is soaring her way through awards season, complete with a “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig for good measure. Her breakout role as Anita in the “West Side Story” screen revival is the kind of performance that demands your attention at all times, whether she’s twirling around a gym floor, dancing through the New York City streets, or grieving in an apartment hallway....

Disney estimates the domestic weekend will come to $134 million, worldwide $435 million. This is phenomenal by any standards other than the franchises mentioned above. However, with an estimated cost of at least $400 million “The Way of Water” is a film that does not conform to standards. The total for all films this weekend is an estimated $152 million. Last year, with “Spider-Man: No Way Home” opening to $260 million, that figure was $283 million....

Bryan Fogel won an 2018 Best Documentary Oscar for “Icarus,” which led the Olympic Committee to ban Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. For “The Dissident,” he took on the assassination of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi and obtained Turkish intelligence transcripts and audio of Khashoggi’s murder that reveal mind-numbing violence. “This is a fight for freedom of speech,” he said. “This is focused on human rights. This is what we’re going through in our own country and fighting for democracy....

A false tropical backdrop and washed-out footage of a well-dressed man with a forced smile yank us into the story and its permeating sense of artifice. Perhaps this man is Yvan’s missing business partner, or perhaps he is the idea of an influential outsider under the thumb of vastly more influential local forces. This is the world Yvan enters with his wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau), and as they arrive at their Buenos Aires hotel in late 1970s; a brief, hot-and-cold chat with the receptionist hints at the conversational maze they’re about to enter....

The sprinklings of people invoking “Puh-uhb” in and around the John Barleycorn is the kind of simple Season 2 joke that’s “Back” in a nutshell. Pronouncing that name becomes more a dejected statement of fact, the kind of thing that writer Simon Blackwell and stars Robert Webb and David Mitchell have turned into their own kind of magic trick over their multi-decade run together. So while there’s plenty of shifting around in “Back” Season 2, the humor comes from the same place: melancholy resignation to the fact that something will always be (fittingly, in the words of the new network’s slogan) slightly off....