He is little known here, but Louis Theroux is one of those journalists who can head a report with his name. Popular for his work at the BBC, he has tackled hot topics such as Scientology, the genocide in Gaza, or the most marginal subcultures in the United States. On Netflix, he has released a documentary about the manosphere, a burning issue on which many reports have focused. The difference in this case is that Theroux uses his fame to interview influencers who are famous and would refuse other reporters. He does not manage to speak with the pimps Andrew and Christian Tate, possibly the best-known gurus of the manosphere, but he does speak with some of their collaborators and colleagues, such as Justin Waller, who runs these brothers' online business, The Real World, a website dedicated to selling courses and tutorials on how to become a millionaire. Also with Myron Gaines, host of the podcast Fresh and Fit; Sneako, a streamer whose channels have already been shut down for his misogynistic and antisemitic comments; or the British tiktoker HSTikkyTokky, who manages his businesses from Marbella and Ibiza, possibly because Miami, according to Theroux the spiritual home of these characters, is too far away. The journalist's strategy consists of positioning himself, with a non-hostile demeanor, in a position of authority regarding his subjects. As he argues from the outset, he is a journalism professional, while the others are influencers; and he is making a report for Netflix, not just content for social media. This distance legitimizes him in front of a group of men accustomed to speaking from a rhetoric of domination. In the documentary, Theroux plays at unmasking the codes with which they represent themselves on social networks. He places them in conversations where they lose control of the narrative, asks them to clarify the meaning of euphemistic expressions such as unilateral monogamy or questions them about some of their misogynistic statements in front of their girlfriends or mothers. In this way, he highlights the contradictions and the lack of solidity of the manosphere's discourses, and how they serve to monetize the anxieties of millions of young people to identify with a model of masculinity that they find attractive, through cryptocurrency businesses, OnlyFans accounts, or supposed courses to become a millionaire. Theroux draws the recurrent pattern of these misogynists: the discourse according to which women are born with value, beauty, while men have to learn to assert themselves, but at the same time can achieve what they set out to do; the conviction that, in a hetero couple, the man must be the provider and the woman must adopt a submissive role of caregiver; the conspiratorial belief in a system (the matrixan allusion to the Wachowskis' film from which the concept of red pill also originates) that deceives men from a very young age so that they are obedient and against which they teach to rebel; and an increasingly evident drift towards antisemitism and other forms of hatred beyond misogyny. The journalist also describes a recurrent scenario that, according to him, would partly explain the attitude of the protagonists: they have all grown up with absent or abusive fathers, or in dysfunctional homes, and would project their trauma onto society. Theroux acknowledges this vulnerable aspect of the manosphere leaders and at the same time warns of the matrix that they themselves generate and that traps millions of teenagers who obtain their emotional education on social networks.

A living legend of Italian cinema, Marco Bellocchio, at over eighty years old, is enjoying a new golden age in his career, which has recently expanded to include television fiction. Four years ago he premiered Exterior nit, a series revolving around a recurring theme in his work: the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro and the impact it had on the political map of his country. Now he premieres the equally splendid Portobellowhich shares several points of contact with the previous title. Once again, we have a miniseries focused on the real-life ordeal of an Italian politician, in this case Enzo Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni, who also played Moro), a member of the Radical Party but much better known as the presenter of a hugely successful television magazine program in 1970s Italy, the Portobello From the title.

In Beladas Department Water nymphs, minairons, witches, demons, the bogeyman, and Count Arnau all appear. But the new fiction series premiered by 3Cat is neither a classic look at Catalan mythology nor an ethnographic educational program. This fictional work, created by Júlia Cot and Jordi López Casanovas, is an approach to folklore from a format that avoids the usual tone of a traditional program about local legends. Beladas Department adopts the model of sitcom labor that coined The officeWe're dealing with an office comedy in the style of a mockumentary, with a constantly moving camera, characters breaking the fourth wall with knowing glances at the audience, and a demystified view of the workplace as a space of productivity. However, the series' tone sets aside the cynicism of the format created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, positioning itself somewhere between the gentler humor of Parks and Recreation and the family-friendly educational comedy tone of Whip.

In The Killers of the MoonMartin Scorsese started from the codes of western to revisit the American founding narrative and highlight, through a real event, the extent to which the country's oil wealth was built on the plunder and massacre of the Indigenous population. The film takes place on Osage lands in Oklahoma, a state also known for another landmark of racist violence, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. It is precisely in Tulsa that the film is set. True hidden, the new series created by Sterling Harjo after Reservation dogsThe series, set on an Indian reservation in the area, centers on Lee (Ethan Hawke), a white owner of a Tulsa used bookstore who also works as a journalist and amateur sleuth. In one of his articles for a local publication, he exposes the shady dealings of the Washbergs, one of Oklahoma's most powerful families, headed by Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), who aspires to become governor. But Donald's brother, Dale (Tim Blake Nelson, one of the series' best performances), is found dead in his home in what appears to be a suicide. Lee suspects that the death wasn't self-inflicted and begins investigating the case, starting with a letter he finds among the first editions of Jim Thompson novels that Dale treasured in his library. The clue gradually leads him to a long history of white supremacy and land grabbing.

No other director in history has demonstrated his passion for cinema with such generosity Martin ScorseseThe person responsible for Taxi Driver He appears in countless tributes of all kinds dedicated to other filmmakers, and has directed two essential series on the subject, A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American cinema (1995) and My trip to Italy (1999). He also heads The Film Foundation, an institution dedicated to the preservation of cinematic heritage, which has already restored more than 900 titles from around the world. Scorsese has spoken extensively about the filmmakers he admires. But we were missing a series that explained why he is a key figure, not only in cinema, but also in contemporary culture.

Whichever channel the viewer chooses, it's almost impossible not to see someone on screen wielding a knife and chopping vegetables. This is more likely on TV3 than on any other channel. La 2 Cat, in its efforts to appear more or less a traditional television channel, has added a well-intentioned cooking show to its schedule, but it's so poorly made it's almost painful to watch. The program is titled... Brutal cuisineThis already demonstrates a lack of imagination on the part of the network, appropriating Marc Ribas's quintessential adjective from TV3. A symptom of a lack of its own personality that doesn't bode well for the network's pretensions. "Brutal" is part of this trend towards impoverished language, towards impact devoid of content. "Brutal" has become the cliché of false expectations.

There are series that are bad, and then there are All those required by law (All's fair), on Disney+. A melodrama about lawyers so grotesque that it grabs your attention in the opening scenes. Then it leaves you indifferent. It's a new production by Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story...), which takes its brand to the extreme, to the point of excess. Kim Kardashian's involvement as an executive producer, in addition to being one of the lead actresses, may be related to this vulgar excess. The series features stars like Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Teyana Taylor, and Sarah Paulson, which might be misleading when considering the show, but the only thing that justifies their presence in this overblown drama is that they were paid an obscene amount of money and deemed it worthwhile.

In 2008, long before MeToo and the boom of women in television comedy, Malena Pichot launched a video blog on YouTube, The crazy shit, which revolutionized online humor with stand-up comedy that addressed everything from the embarrassment of calling your ex to pre-period moods. The format opened the door to conquering a territory as masculinized as audiovisual comedy from a feminine and feminist perspective, and became a reference for many subsequent podcasters, such as those responsible for the popular Weekly Deformed. Pichot has maintained her popularity on social media (she has over a million followers on X), to the point of becoming a widely recognized media figure in Argentina, who delves into political and feminist issues without being intimidated by hateful reactions.

It's often recalled that Hollywood is an industry created and governed by Jewish executives. But the paradox this entails is much less discussed. Commercial cinema and, to a large extent, the American audiovisual industry have never given prominence to the everyday experience of Judaism. Pragmatic, the promoters of the Hollywood studio system were clear that one of the great potentials of cinema was to become an assimilationist tool, a mass communication medium that would allow millions of immigrants from around the world to integrate into an idea of an American nation that was identifiable, with respect to religious social practices. We have countless films and series about the celebration of Christmas, but we don't know much about how Hanukkah is celebrated.

In the first season of The White Lotus, Creator Mike White reinforced the tone of a black comedy critical of the tourism industry with an outline of a postcolonial discourse from a Hawaiian perspective. One of the supporting characters explained how the United States had appropriated the archipelago to the point that its original inhabitants had ended up working in subsidiary jobs for white economic interests. For most Westerners, Hawaii has been reduced to an exotic landscape of paradisiacal beaches and flowery shirts where you can spend your vacations if you have a little money. It is probably Hollywood's most recent attempt at creating a Hawaiian-centric fiction. Lilo & Stitch...

Wong Kar-wai was allowed to do a seriesWe're talking about one of the contemporary filmmakers who excels most in melodrama, and a creator who likes to expand his stories, which often expand across different spatial and temporal dimensions, as in great serials. He also does this in Blossoms Shanghai, his debut in television fiction, with a narrative around the turn towards capitalism of Chinese society, represented in the meteoric rise of Ah Bao (Hu Ge), a young man who becomes rich when the Shanghai stock exchange opens and becomes the most charismatic figure in the city. Based on the novel by Jin Yucheng, Wong follows the brutal transformations that contemporary China has undergone, in a series of 30 episodes (15 accessible to the press) that once again highlights the genius of the director of Happy together when it comes to recreating the history of an era down to the smallest detail, from objects to all kinds of dishes, from the most popular (beef chow fun) to the most extravagant (food fans will enjoy the episodes in which a culinary war breaks out between rival establishments).

Now largely and unfairly forgotten, David Lean became one of the world's most popular and prestigious filmmakers with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a major production about a British prisoner of war camp under Japanese control during World War II in which soldiers are forced to build the railway bridge of the title, a route between Burma and Thailand to the greater glory of Japanese imperialism. From the best-seller A namesake of Pierre Boulle, Lean turned the film into a portrait of the delirium of war through the confrontation between the representatives of two empires in crisis: the British military man who forces his men to build the bridge for the enemy out of pure megalomaniacal discipline, and the Japanese who exert strict control over the prisoners. The narrow road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, published in 2013, has often been seen as Australia's response to Boulle's book and Lean's film. The author drew on both his father's experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war and those of a renowned Australian doctor who endured the same hardships in the construction of that famous railway, to craft a drama of love and war that has now been turned into a miniseries. The protagonist, Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) is a surgeon engaged to a girl from a good family. When he is about to be called up, he falls in love and becomes involved with his uncle's young wife, a relationship that will mark him for life. The modernity ofThe Bridge on the River Kwai It was based on creating a war film without heroes or a possible happy ending. The narrow path It also questions the immutability of the hero figure, based on the evolution of Evans, who as an adult becomes a renowned doctor, but also cynical and incapable of love.

A few years ago, there was a small wave of trauma comedies, series that addressed issues usually associated with drama (mental health, illness, etc.) from an unexpectedly humorous perspective. Titles like Lady Dynamite and One Mississippi now it is added Dying for sex, a sex comedy about a woman who is in stage 4, metastatic, breast cancer. Molly (Michelle Williams) has been following a treatment that seemed effective for a tumor until the doctor informs her that, unfortunately, the cancer has reappeared and spread to her bones. There's nothing left to do except slow the process and provide her with the best palliative care possible. Although her husband supports her, she realizes she doesn't want to spend the last days of her life with the man she married. She prefers to be with her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), an aspiring actress who is as loving as she is absent-minded. Molly makes another decision. She doesn't want to die without having experienced an orgasm. Because despite having lived with a partner for so many years, she has never achieved complete sexual pleasure. And the chemo, which leaves her crushed in many ways, also seems to stimulate her libido. So she decides to sign up for Tinder and make up for lost time as much as possible when it comes to sexual enjoyment.

One of the main symptoms of the uniqueness of The rehearsal (The essays), which has released its second season, is how difficult it is to describe what it is about. Its creator, Nathan Fielder, studied business before training in the art of comedy. Nathan for you, the comedy show in which he offered to improve business proposals that weren't working out, and which led to surprising results. The essays part of a similar idea. Here it is about analyzing why a real-life situation doesn't work, in order to test possible fictional scenarios that contribute to solving it. In catastrophes such as the Corporate Airlines plane that crashed in Missouri in 2004 or the US-Bangla Airlines flight that crashed upon landing in 2018 in Kathmandu, the recordings reveal how verbal communication between pilot and co-pilot failed.

A snow that falls incessantly over Buenos Aires marks the apocalyptic imagery ofThe Eternaut, the comic written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and drawn by Francisco Solano López, recently released as a series on Netflix. In the original work, also published in serial format between 1957 and 1959, the image of deadly dust falling from the sky and raining down on the world echoes the memory of the black rain of Hiroshima. The comic appeared in the midst of the Cold War and, within the codes of science fiction, could be read from that anti-war consciousness. The subsequent fate of its creator permeated The Eternaut from another retrospective interpretation. A member of the Montoneros from the 1970s onwards, Oesterheld was kidnapped by his country's armed forces during the military dictatorship. His four daughters, Marina, Beatriz, Diana, and Estela, young women between the ages of 18 and 26, had already been "disappeared" beforehand. Their bodies have never been found, nor have the perpetrators been brought to trial. The Oesterhelds' repression charged his emblematic work with a metaphorical subtext in which the protagonists, a group of survivors of an alien invasion, become an example of how to resist in a state of exceptional violence.

In the summer of 2003, Marie Trintignant was admitted to a Vilnius hospital in a coma. The actress was in Lithuania filming a biopic about the writer Colette in a very family-friendly setting: it was directed by her mother, Nadine Trintignant, and also featured Roman Kolinka, her eldest son, and the singer Lio, her best friend. Marie was also staying with her partner at the time, the singer Bertrand Cantat, leader of the band Noir Désir. He was the one who reported that Marie had fallen unconscious. In the hospital, she underwent several operations to try to reverse the coma. The family decided to move Marie Trintignant to France, where she died on August 1, aged just 41.

"I observed the Terror I was speaking of on a small island, easy to travel around in one day, with a single stage on a motorcycle. It is as if nationalist Spain [...], reduced to a convenient staircase, had found itself gathered within reach." A right-wing writer, devout Catholic and rabid anti-republican, Georges Bernanos became the unexpected witness and the great international chronicler of Franco's repression in Mallorca during the Civil War, denouncing firsthand the The great cemeteries under the moon, also as a cry of alarm about what could happen imminently in Europe.

When was the last time we laughed heartily? What do you want at an American series? Laugh like you're cracking up, not like you draw a slight upward curve with your lips. Into this increasingly barren territory of laughter lands The Studio, one of the best series of the season, brought to life by two of the biggest names in American comedy at the beginning of the 21st century, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. As screenwriters and, in some cases, also as directors, this pair of colleagues are behind cult titles such as Superbad (2007), Super stoned (2011), Brawl to the end (2013) or Sausage Party (2016). With The Studio They reveal how they maintain their capacity for hilarity in a more mature fiction, one might say, centered around Hollywood's favorite subject: the industry itself.

There have been few on-screen performances more impactful than Tim Roth's when he made his television production debut. Made in Britain (1982), by Alan Clarke. The film opens with a close-up of the actor, who has a swastika painted on his forehead and a defiant stare as he walks toward the court where he will be tried for a racist attack. The camera follows him in a long shot punctuated by a punk theme that injects an unavoidable aggressiveness into the scene. Made in Britain It is part of the tradition of a British television model that turned the audiovisual media into a territory of confrontation of the country's social conflicts, a tradition that includes Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, and also Clarke, perhaps the most daring of all.

Humphrey Bogart turned Sam Spade, the anti-hero created by Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon, who would become the prototype, along with Philip Marlowe, of the protagonist of the noir novel and film. A brilliant detective, with his own morals and sufficiently skeptical to hand over the woman he's attracted to to the police. But what becomes of Spade in adulthood? This is what two great names in television creation, Scott Frank (Queen's Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz) in the series Mr. Spade, in which Clive Owen takes Bogart's testimony as a now-retired detective in France, in the idyllic and invented village of Bozouls, where he is staying in a beautiful estate left to him by his wife. A privileged retirement is turned upside down when six nuns from a nearby convent are murdered and he feels the obligation to protect the teenage girl they were taking in, Teresa (Cara Bossom), the reason that brought him to Europe.