Arts

What’s on TV BIG LITTLE LIES 9 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. The Monterey Five have been on a loop this season of “he slipped,” guilt, infidelity and a smattering of viciousness from Mary Louise (Meryl Streep), the shadowy mother-in-law of Celeste (Nicole Kidman). “‘Big Little Lies’ is evolving into ‘Big Little Truths,’ and it’s unclear whether that will sustain a long-running story or just a well-made curtain call,” James Poniewozik wrote in his New York Times review. How (or if) the show will come to an end — and whether the five women will finally snap — will come to light in the Season 2 finale. After a brutal beginning to a trial for the custody of Max (Nicholas Crovetti) and Josh (Cameron Crovetti), Celeste’s children, Celeste will attempt to turn the tables on the woman determined to destroy the lives of the Monterey Five. Despite an already large pile of secrets stacked against the women, a … [Read more...] about What’s on TV Sunday: ‘Big Little Lies’ and ‘Typewriter’

Film: Burt Lancaster, All Month Long July 19; filmforum.org and filmlinc.org Burt Lancaster came by his tough guy reputation honestly. Raised on the streets of East Harlem, he attended high school in Hell’s Kitchen and earned an athletic scholarship to N.Y.U. before dropping out to join the circus. He cut such a physically charismatic swath in his 1946 film debut — as the Swede, an injured boxer-turned-bank robber, in “The Killers” — that the critic Pauline Kael anointed him “a great specimen of hunkus Americanus.” From July 19-25, a new 4K restoration of that Robert Siodmak film noir classic, with a sizzling Ava Gardner as the femme fatale, kicks off “Burt Lancaster,” a four-week festival at Film Forum in Manhattan. The 37-movie lineup includes “Sweet Smell of Success,” “From Here to Eternity,” “Sorry, Wrong Number,” “Atlantic City,” “The Professionals,” … [Read more...] about The Week in Arts: Lalah Hathaway, Clay Play and ‘Douglas’

What’s on TV FIRST MAN (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. While this Oscar-winning drama about Neil Armstrong touches on the space race and the political issues the moon landing raised at New York Times review. “Like some of the ancient epics ‘First Man’ is primarily a character study, a space odyssey with a diffident and enigmatic Ulysses at its center." Ryan Gosling, collaborating with “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle for the second time, portrays the astronaut in the years leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. The screenplay draws from James R. Hansen’s biography and contrasts Armstrong’s reserved, hard-to-read temperament with the larger-than-life job he has shouldered. We watch as he and his wife (Claire Foy) grieve over the loss of their daughter, prepare for the launch and wrestle with the fact that Armstrong could go down in history as the first man to walk on the moon — or perish in outer space. APOLLO: … [Read more...] about What’s on TV Saturday: Movies About the Moon Landing

Ida Wyman, a photographer who in the 1940s and ’50s roamed New York and other cities to capture compelling images of everyday people working, playing, idling, dancing or selling newspapers, died on July 13 in Fitchburg, Wis., near Madison. She was 93. Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by Heather Garrison, her granddaughter. Ms. Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a “special kind of happiness” in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers. “Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed,” she said in an essay for the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, one of her dealers, “which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in … [Read more...] about Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93

João Gilberto, whose death at 88 was announced earlier this month, was the father of bossa nova — the terse, intimate and cosmopolitan sound that took over Brazil in the late 1950s and helped set the agenda for the global pop of the early 1960s. In 1965, “Getz/Gilberto,” an album he made with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, won the Grammy for album of the year. The reign of bossa nova — as it was originally intended — was brief. It was an engagement with and a rejoinder to the samba that preceded it, and by the late 1960s, the Tropicalia movement had captured the center of Brazil’s creative imagination. But bossa nova has had a long and not always substantive afterlife; it has become the stuff of car commercials, beach bars and other places a dash of cosmopolitanism is needed. Gilberto likely hated that. He was a stoic performer, interested in achieving the purest possible sound with his voice and guitar. This week’s Popcast is a … [Read more...] about The Loudness of João Gilberto, Bossa Nova’s King of Quiet