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A new report from Vulture on “Succession” Season 3 confirms: “[Creator Jesse] Armstrong decided early on that the season’s finished scripts wouldn’t be rewritten to incorporate the ongoing pandemic. ‘These are really wealthy people,’ says [Shiv Roy actress] Sarah Snook. ‘And unfortunately, none of the world’s really wealthy people were going to be affected by the pandemic.’” “Succesion” Season 3 won’t tackle Covid, but Covid directly affected the series. As the Vulture report continues: “In March 2020, Mark Blum, who played the cruise-division executive Bill Lockhart, died of complications from COVID....

Working from home doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be confined to just one room. Regardless of how much space you have, lap desks and portable laptop tables are a great alternative to a traditional desk, plus they’re perfect if you don’t have a dedicated home office. Because laptops tend to work better on a hard surface, a portable lap desk can help your device stay ventilated to prevent it from getting hot, which could potentially save you money in the long run....

Just this past Oscar season, a Western came very close to winning best picture: Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.” That film used the landscape of the West to interrogate American masculinity and the way it imprisons men as much as it does anyone else. If that film whet your appetite for more in the genre, here are some others you should check out. From violent revenge thrillers to comedies, keep reading for 15 of the best contemporary films about the American West....

After watching some rehearsals, Coen started to see his way to doing it as a film, inspired more by Carl Dreyer and Roman Polanski than Orson Welles, Coen said. The film is stripped down and overtly a play, but it’s also visual and aural and cinematic, shot by five-time Oscar nominee Bruno Delbonnel (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) in glorious black-and-white. “The Tragedy of Macbeth” does have that “Chimes of Midnight” foggy-set feel, as Coen got a kick out of figuring out how to create “awkward” scale on a soundstage, as F....

The largely Asian American student body of Lowell High School also means that the kids are woke without it being obnoxious, and don’t view race as a barrier to success. “Try Harder!” charts the course of a senior year in high school, as a handful of overachieving students endure the grind of college applications and AP tests. Most have their eyes on Stanford or top-tier UC schools, and by the end of the film, not everyone gets in....

Arguing in favor of its format, the limited series is very much about TV. Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch (and played by Elizabeth Olsen), finds herself living through a version of ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s era TV sitcoms, alongside her atypical romantic partner, a synthetic android named Vision (Paul Bettany). The couple constitutes a classic pair: a homemaking housewife and an office drone husband; she frets over fitting in with the neighbors, and he stresses over a promotion being dangled at work....

But they, like the documentary, understand why we still need to talk about Bill Cosby. As Bell states in his opening narration, plenty of people make passing comments on the matter — whether it’s celebrities on talk shows or posts on social media — without getting to the root of what his actions exemplify in American culture. Over four hours, “We Need to Talk About Cosby” details the indisputable contributions he made to the world without ever drifting too far from the toxic behavior inflicted on the many, many individuals he hurt....