Today news: ‘Some Seeds Are Being Planted.’ How Yasuke Paves a New Path for Black Creators in Anime

It was around 13 years ago when LeSean Thomas first learned of Yasuke. At that time, Thomas came across the 1968 Japanese children’s book Kuro-suke by Kurusu Yoshio and saw illustrations of the real-life African warrior who arrived in 16th century Japan and served under Oda Nobunaga—a greatly influential feudal lord who is widely regarded as the first unifier of the country. “It kind of felt like a secret treasure,” Thomas said. He found it particularly fascinating that the story of Yasuke, largely considered to be the first foreign-born samurai, was told in a Japanese work. “I just thought it was really cool that there was someone in Japan who was validating this because as a concept in the West at that time, it was kind of viewed as a self-insert culturally to put a Black man with someone who was one of the unifiers of Japan,” Thomas told TIME in a recent Zoom interview. “Even at the time I didn’t believe it.”

That disbelief has since faded, and more than a decade after his revelation, the longtime animation producer and comic artist, whose previous credits include Cannon Busters, The Legend of Korra and The Boondocks, is now the creator and director of the Netflix anime series Yasuke. The series, which premiered on April 29, reimagines the story of the Black warrior with a fantastical twist. In the show, the eponymous character (voiced by LaKeith Stanfield) is driven by a sense of duty to keep the weak safe. When a man draws his sword on a child in the first episode, Yasuke calmly steps in to fight him—and swiftly defeats him. And after a traumatic event leads the character to leave the battlefield behind for a quiet life as a boatsman, he feels compelled to pick up his sword again when asked to help a sickly young girl. With a steady and assured voice, Stanfield’s performance imbues the character with strength and authority.

To create the series, Thomas—who was born in New York City and is now based in Tokyo—teamed up with Japanese powerhouse animation studio MAPPA (Jujutsu Kaisen, Attack on Titan: The Final Season). The music producer, rapper and filmmaker Flying Lotus composed music for the show and also served as executive producer.

“There is a serendipitous nature about this project, how an African-American man goes to Japan to live and work amongst the very best in Japanese anime to create an anime about an African who goes to Japan to live amongst the Japanese elite and become a warrior,” Thomas said in a press release last month. Flying Lotus, who joins our Zoom interview from Los Angeles, where he is based, also saw a parallel between Yasuke’s story and his own experience working on the series. “My involvement with the music part too is, again, another kind of outsider trying to work in the system—the Japanese anime system—which is totally different to how we do things here,” Flying Lotus said.

In the show, though Yasuke is almost immediately welcomed by Nobunaga, some close to the feudal lord repeatedly disparage his status as a foreigner and a Black man. Flying Lotus said he was unsure of the response he would receive when the project was first proposed. “I had to go to Japan and ask the Japanese system if it was cool for us to do this show and we had to pretty much be welcomed into the squad,” he said. “And who knows if there was that moment of hesitation.” He and Thomas described Flying Lotus’ trip in the spring of 2018—where the pair met with MAPPA CEO Manabu Otsuka over dinner at a traditional Japanese restaurant to discuss the show. “We needed to get his blessing,” Thomas said. The meal ended positively. Otsuka was on board and the group took a photo—“the start of something cool,” as Thomas called it.

Ahead of Yasuke’s release, Thomas and Flying Lotus spoke to TIME about creating a new animated hero, the portrayal of Black characters in anime and how they hope the Netflix series will inspire the next generation of Black creators.

Read more: The True Story of Yasuke, the Legendary Black Samurai Behind Netflix’s New Anime Series

Creating a new Black action hero in animation

In the anime series, Yasuke wields a sword against humans, robots and magical beasts in fight sequences with stunning choreography. For Thomas, creating a new action hero who is Black was front of mind in making the show. “For this generation, we haven’t really seen a lot of Black animated TV heroes that are created by us,” he said, referring to Black creators. The director referenced Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks—the 2005 sitcom that Thomas worked on as a co-director of several episodes and as a character supervisor—and Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan’s 2000 series Static Shock, as the few examples he had seen. (While The Boondocks, which follows a Black family, is not of the superhero genre, Thomas said it’s fair to call many of its characters heroes.) He added that when it comes to Japanese animated series with a lead Black character, there have been few examples besides Afro Samurai, the 2007 television show adapted from Takashi Okazaki’s 1998 manga series.

“It’s the kind of thing where hopefully the right kids see it,” Flying Lotus said of Yasuke. “I just hope that some seeds are being planted, and this is just the beginning of the onslaught of Black animation.”

Thomas said that he had expected a wave of Black creators in the animation space to follow after The Boondocks began airing more than 15 years ago, but it “didn’t really happen.” He thinks the current moment will be different. “I feel like with streaming and technology, it’s better for us to try it now—you see a lot more Black creatives in the industry,” he explained. Thomas hopes that Black kids will watch Yasuke and be encouraged to try something similar in the future. “Even if they don’t like it, it will motivate them to want to do it—to do a better job than what we did,” Thomas said.

The portrayal of Black characters in anime

This hope for more Black creators to enter the anime space comes at a time when the global popularity of Japanese animated series and films continues to surge. Just last weekend, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train, the film adapted from Koyoharu Gotouge’s manga, made the biggest foreign-language debut in the U.S. when its North American opening weekend raked in more than $21 million—even with capacity restrictions at theaters due to the pandemic. As international audiences for the medium grow, so have discussions about the ways in which characters of different racial and ethnic backgrounds are depicted in anime. In particular, the portrayal of Black characters that trade in racial stereotypes—in series old and new—has sparked conversations.

This subject was front of mind for Flying Lotus and Thomas in the creative process of Yasuke. Flying Lotus brings up comments from observing past works of anime. “Man, how they gonna do us like that… go draw the hands right, why the lips gotta look like that,” he recalls.

On the note of coloring Black characters’ palms in a lighter tone than the rest of the hand, Thomas said the design is often omitted for financial reasons. “Black creators in the United States have never, if rarely, colored the palms of their Black characters’ skins accurately,” he explained. “We don’t normally do that because TV productions are very, very low budget, generally, compared to feature films.” But in creating Yasuke, Thomas wanted to do something different. “As someone who’s self-aware of that as a producer and as a Black creator working with Black characters predominantly, that was something we wanted to add,” he said. “[Takeshi] Koike-sama was totally on board with it,” Thomas said of the series animator.

Courtesy of Netflix

Thomas recalled his experience working on the anime series Cannon Busters, which was released on Netflix in 2019 and based on a 2005 comic book series he had co-written. The animated series was produced by the Japanese studios Satelight and Yumeta Company. “When I did Cannon Busters, which was my first show with Netflix featuring an all predominantly brown cast, there were so many notes I had to give on the show,” he said. “They were just on default mode drawing these Black characters with the sausage lips.” He said this type of art style has been standardized in Japanese animation since a few decades ago, and it’s one that has been influenced by minstrel images from white Western media. Satelight and Yumeta Company did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment.

“We didn’t have any problems with MAPPA but I had to be super careful about my intentions on how to depict [Yasuke] based off of my experiences working on Cannon Busters,” Thomas added. “I don’t think it’s a malicious thing, but I definitely think that there needs to be someone who’s there to be like, ‘Hey, this is not cool, perhaps try it this way.’”

Holding manga creators accountable

Thomas also explained that he thinks some of the criticism toward anime directors regarding racially insensitive depictions of Black characters has been misdirected. He noted that many of the series that have received complaints are adapted from long-running manga. “It’s not the Japanese directors who are saying, ‘This is what Black people look like.’ It’s the manga creators because [the Japanese directors] are adapting exactly from the manga,” Thomas said. “It really puts the onus on the mangakas, the manga creators who are depicting us in those negative ways in Dragon Ball Z, Sister Krone in The Promised Neverland, One Punch Man.”

The characters of Mr. Popo in Dragon Ball Z, Sister Krone in The Promised Neverland and Superalloy Darkshine in One Punch Man have all been criticized for embodying features reminiscent of minstrel imagery. While they are not all Black—Mr. Popo, for instance, is a non-human deity—their depictions largely appear to be rooted in racist tropes. The three works are also examples of anime shows that were adapted from popular manga series—Dragon Ball was first published in 1984, The Promised Neverland in 2016, One Punch Man in 2009. “There’s probably other manga that depicts Black people in a racist, caricatured way,” Thomas said. “But those mangas aren’t popular enough to be adapted to TV shows.”

And while anime directors and producers have the ability to make changes to the original content, they usually do not. Thomas said that when it comes to Japanese anime creators adapting manga, there is so much respect for the source material that they tend to replicate the art. “There isn’t going to be a social justice consultant during the anime adaptation saying, hey, Black people don’t like the way they look here, let’s change Akira Toriyama’s Mr. Popo,” Thomas said. Flying Lotus chimed in. “Honestly, they should though, cause that sh-t is offensive as f-ck.” he said. “That’s a quick phone call that don’t take much to verify, like, ask a Black guy.”

In the case of Mr. Popo, whose portrayal has been widely criticized for evoking blackface, one version of a more recent broadcast by 4Kids has turned the character blue in an attempt to address the racial insensitivity. This is similar to the recoloring of Jynx from Pokémon, a character who the game developer Game Freak changed from black to purple following criticism that the design resembled blackface. (Jynx first appeared in the 1996 Pokémon video game.)

“The manga creators need to be a bit more educated, because they don’t have a problem getting white Europeans right, and they’re not Japanese either,” Thomas continued. He referenced Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist, both of which are anime series adapted from manga that follow protagonists largely believed to be of European descent. “They’re very careful in the depictions of European history,” Thomas said. “They don’t have any real experience with the African diaspora.”

Thomas said he has seen fewer examples of Black people depicted negatively in Japanese animated works that are not adapted from manga. He cited Shinichirō Watanabe, most famously known for his anime series Cowboy Bebop, as someone who has been thoughtful in portraying Black characters in his original creations. “He’s intentional with his depictions of us in his content whenever he does depict us,” Thomas said. Though Japan is a largely homogenous society, there is a greater call for anime, one of its most popular exports, to celebrate racial diversity and depict racially diverse characters in more authentic ways.

Courtesy of Netflix

The legacy of Yasuke

For both Thomas and Flying Lotus, the significance of their creative direction—and Stanfield’s—in Yasuke can’t be understated. “Who knows about where LeSean, me and LaKeith will go after this,” Flying Lotus said. “I just hope that this project shows the world that there are so many Black anime fans.”

Thomas said that as a 16-year-old Black kid, he would have been deeply impacted by a group of Black men, each respected in his field, coming together to create a Japanese anime about a Black hero. “As a Black man seeing a dude from New York City doing this sh-t I would have lost my mind,” he said, referencing his South Bronx roots. Thomas said a project like Yasuke would have propelled him to do something similar. “I didn’t have that. So, for me, at the age that I’m at now, I’m just trying to be who I needed at 16 as a Black kid.”

Today news: Limbo Is a Wry and Tender Comedy About Refugees Searching for the Meaning of ‘Home’

Though some filmmakers might insist you can make a film about a hot-button issue like the refugee crisis, in the end you can only make films about people. Limbo, the second feature from Scottish director Ben Sharrock, is about people who happen to be refugees, a group of young men from various nations who have been given temporary shelter on a remote Scottish island as they wait to see if they’ve been granted asylum. Their housing, a nest of nondescript little cottages, bears a handmade sign that reads REFUGEES WELCOME with a heart appended. Some of the locals do welcome them with well-meaning but misguided enthusiasm (by offering, for instance, a clumsy “cultural awareness” course that’s designed to indoctrinate the newcomers to western ways but succeeds only in bewildering them), while others, particularly the local teenagers, inflict indifferent hostility. To the islanders, all of the men are outsiders, strangers from other lands. But they’re also outsiders to one another, a group of lost souls coming from a jumble of different cultures and backgrounds. Even so, one anxiety unifies them: no one wants to, or can afford to, be sent back.

Omar (Amir El-Masry) has come from Syria, a country his parents have also fled, though they’ve settled—and are only just getting by—in Istanbul. Omar’s older brother, Nabil, has stayed behind to fight for his country, and it becomes clear that the brothers’ forked paths have caused a rift between them. Omar is a gifted musician—like his father and grandfather before him, he plays the oud—though before he left Syria, he injured his hand and has since been unable to play. Still, everywhere he goes on the island, he carries the instrument with him, as if it were the whole of his past tucked inside a case. He doesn’t dare let go of it.

Courtesy of Focus Features—©2021 Focus Features, LLC.Vikash Bhai and Amir El-Masry find connection on a remote Scottish isle

If all of that makes Limbo sound tremendously heavy, the opposite is true: this is perhaps more than anything a comedy, a picture whose dry wit recalls that of another Scottish filmmaker, Bill Forsyth, who, in the 1980s, gave us wonderfully wry comedies like Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. Sharrock has a similar lightness of touch, even though his film has some serious underpinnings: It’s a reflection on what happens when individuals from disparate places get together and need to define, for themselves above all, what “home” means and what it means to leave it.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Omar, handsome but sullen, with soft, brooding eyes, has three roommates: Abedi (Kwabena Ansah) and Wasef (Ola Orebiyi) are from Ghana and Nigeria respectively, though they have presented themselves as brothers, hoping to strengthen their chances of getting asylum—a gentle metaphor for the way two people desperate to find a better life can become a kind of family. But Omar becomes closest with Farhad (Vikash Bhai), who’s from Afghanistan. (In one of their early encounters, Omar asks Farhad how, in his home country, it’s possible to tell what women are thinking if their faces are covered, a way of reinforcing the point that their two countries are hardly the same.) Farhad is resourceful, enterprising and sensitive: He scrounges things he needs—and some things he doesn’t, like a hat designed to look like a panda face—from the local donation center. He tells Omar about his hero, Freddie Mercury, whose picture he carries with him always: He and Freddie have the same mustache, he points out, and the same religion, Zoroastrianism. At home, Farhad had a chicken he loved, named after Mercury; in his desolate, temporary Scottish home, he adopts another, also named Freddie, who, to the consternation of the others, becomes a fifth roommate.

Farhad also becomes Omar’s agent-slash-manager, urging him to pick up the oud again. Omar’s hand has healed, but he refuses to play, or simply can’t. He’s frozen by uncertainty: Is he in the right place? Will he be able to help his parents, who, we learn from his fraught phone calls home, desperately need it? Should he return to his country to fight for it, as his brother is doing? Limbo, tender and searching, shows what can happen to people when they’re between points A and B, a nowheresville that can change the shape of a life forever. It’s also about the meaning of musicianship, of how songs and sound can define who we are and where we come from. When you think you have nothing, at least you have music. It’s a home you carry with you.

Today news: A New Season of The Girlfriend Experience Gives Us Yet Another Exploration of Tech and Male Desire

The third season of The Girlfriend Experience begins with a job interview in virtual space. In a bare, glowing white room, Iris (a supple yet self-possessed Julia Goldani Telles of The Affair) explains to a glamorous older woman that she’s abandoning an elite undergraduate education in the States for a new life in London. Beyond a few unnerving details—sometimes the women speak without moving their lips—the meeting only seems remarkable, after a year when more people than ever were communicating mostly via technology, in the context of a show about high-end sex workers. What the protagonists of this Steven Soderbergh movie turned Starz anthology, whose alternately enthralling, stimulating and sluggish first new episodes since 2017 premiere on May 2, have in common is that each exchanges intimate physical contact for money.

Just before she clinches the gig with an exclusive escort service, Iris explains what she has to offer along with her milky skin and wide sapphire eyes: “I’m good at reading people.” This is like Joan Didion claiming to be merely “good” at reading the mood of the culture. In her new day job at an artificial intelligence company, Iris is using her precocious aptitude for neuroscience and behavioral psychology to research sexual attraction. By night, she gathers information from the field, making covert audio recordings of sessions with world leaders and pro athletes whose most deep-seated desires she is eerily skilled at detecting. At some point in every encounter, an epiphany flickers across her face and Iris—the name of a flower but also a crucial part of eyes both animal and mechanical—suddenly knows how to alter her behavior to suit her date.

The convergence of tech and desire seems like an inevitable direction for The Girlfriend Experience, whose past incarnations have juxtaposed upscale sex work with the similarly lucrative labor performed in high-level political and legal professions. Filmmaker Anja Marquardt, who joined the series after two seasons written and directed by creators Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, clearly has a fascination with this sort of labor; her 2014 feature She’s Lost Control follows a female psychology grad student who works as sexual surrogate. And in many ways, the character-driven story Marquardt tells is a return to form for a show that excelled most in a debut season focused on a law-student escort played by Riley Keough.

Aimee Spinks/Starz‘The Girlfriend Experience’

Like that character, Iris is brilliant, beautiful and appears to have her life under meticulously compartmentalized control… until her situation devolves enough to reveal how fragile it was all along. Marquardt spends much of the first half-season setting a mood of eerie, clinical calm. (I was provided with five episodes, out of 10 total.) In apartments and offices whose aesthetics seem to be converging along with their functions, the atmosphere is both luxe and minimalistic: brushed metal surfaces, mammoth glass windows, monastic concrete walls, furniture and clothing in all the bloodless colors of the iPad rainbow. Iris explains mirror neurons—“our ability to perceive what someone’s thinking or feeling”—to a coworker and mirrors become a visual motif. When Iris mirrors the desires of her clients, she becomes a sentient version of the A.I. she’s studying by day. Mechanical eyes as well as human ones use an iris to let in light.

It’s refreshing to see TV take on big ideas from science and philosophy without dumbing them down out of deference to network executives’ knee-jerk underestimation of their audience. And this immersion in an existence that blurs the line between humanity and technology can be intriguing. But the show moves so slowly as it deepens these thematic connections (thematic neural networks?), drawing artificial limbs and deepfakes and fatalism into its web of metaphors, that the plot barely starts moving until episode 5. It’s hard to say, midway through the season, whether the next five episodes will justify the patience it takes to get to that far.

In the meantime, perhaps the scene-setting feels as redundant as it does because anxiety around the intersection of love, sex and technology has—for obvious reasons—become a pop-culture obsession. Specifically, we keep getting dark visions of heterosexual male desire filtered through computers and robotics. This month’s HBO Max adaptation of Alissa Nutting’s novel Made for Love introduced an all-powerful tech mogul who wouldn’t rest until he’d invaded every corner of his wife’s consciousness. Before that, Humans saw a family thrown into crisis following the father’s indiscretion with their robot assistant. In Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac memorably played a reclusive search-engine CEO whose only companions are model-gorgeous android babes. It all harkens back to that pessimistic, Stepford Wives notion that what men want most from women is not connection but submission (even if what the woman is submitting to turns out to be a male fantasy of female domination). The girlfriend experience without the girlfriend obligation.

It makes sense for art to interrogate patriarchal desire. So much of the world we live in has been, and continues to be, shaped by it; that goes double for the male-dominated tech realm. Still: as we look to a future mediated by A.I., why do we still spend so little time imagining how technological advances might intersect with the physical and emotional needs of people who are not straight men? This season of The Girlfriend Experience contains some promising ideas, even though it retreads some familiar ground and the gendered implications of Iris’ double life go largely unacknowledged. Next time, how about The Boyfriend Experience?

Today news: Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse Unapologetically Kicks Off a Bland New Franchise

There are some movie titles you can’t say with a straight face, and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is one of them. It’s a title with all the swagger of a 200-page contract heavy with riders, an appellation that stands, arms akimbo, in defiance of Pee-wee Herman’s dictum “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” Every time you say it, an angel dressed like a Navy SEAL gets its wings.

And yet, in these stressful times, a little mindless action isn’t wholly unwelcome, and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse—directed by Stefano Sollima, who not long ago gave us Sicario: Day of the Soldado—is moderately un-terrible, a diversion that hits every beat predictably, with a mighty grunt. It takes itself more seriously than it should, but you can take it with as much seriousness as you like. Personally, I advise little to none.

The plot, adapted from—surprise!—Tom Clancy’s 1993 novel Without Remorse, provides a backstory for John Clark, one of the recurring characters in Clancy’s series of novels featuring Jack Ryan. Clark, who first appears to us as John Kelly, a Navy SEAL on a dangerous mission in Aleppo, Syria, is played by Michael B. Jordan. Shady-looking CIA guy Robert Ritter (Jamie Bell), whose gaze is as untrustworthy as one of those cartoon kitty-cat clocks with the shifting eyes, barks orders cynically. You just know he’s bad news. But John has an ally in Lieutenant Commander Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith); later, this will be important. And at a certain point, back in the States, Guy Pearce appears as one of the good guys. Yay!

Nadja Klier / Amazon Studios—© 2020 Paramount PicturesJodie Turner-Smith and Michael B. Jordan

But nothing is as it seems in Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. You probably already knew that, didn’t you? When John returns from his mission, tragedy befalls him in a plot point so egregiously manipulative you might be tempted to call this movie Tom Clancy’s Without Shame. He must find the perpetrator of this heinous crime, but his first step in doing so lands him in jail.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

There is much discharging of automatic weapons and men going “Gaaah!” in Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. There is also moderate discharging of self-serious dialogue like “I’m not a soldier. I’m a felon.” In the movie’s quieter moments, many of the actors are fun to watch: Turner-Smith (best known for her role in Queen & Slim) has an elegant gravitas about her, and you might wonder what she’d be able to do in a Grace Jones biopic. The terrific Georgian actor Merab Ninidze, recently seen in The Courier, plays a throwaway Russian villain, but I still perked up when I saw him. And Jordan gives his all even to this crassly commercial franchise-starter. The test of a good actor isn’t what he does with great roles but how he tackles mediocre ones, and Jordan is a pretty good actor. He takes the movie’s dialogue, most of it squat and square as a Humvee, and at least tries to give it wings. He makes John Kelly-soon-to-be-John Clark’s anguish, and his thirst for retribution, feel electric and believable, and that helps breathe some life into this pretty much business-as-usual movie. Whose title, in case you’ve forgotten, is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. That’s its name, don’t wear it out.

Today news: Justin Theroux Is Great in The Mosquito Coast. But What Is This Muddled Meditation on American Life Trying to Say?

There’s something singular about Justin Theroux. Compared with the other leading men of his generation, the star of the new Apple TV+ series The Mosquito Coast has a presence less delicate than Leonardo DiCaprio or Jude Law, less fratty than Matt Damon or Ben Affleck, less anxious than his closest analogue, Ethan Hawke. What defines Theroux, aside from abs that have been known to make the paparazzi pant, is a brooding, cerebral sense of alienation. After 25 years in Hollywood, a celebrity marriage with ex-wife Jennifer Aniston and recently an Esquire cover, he still reads as an outsider. That quality has never felt more pronounced than it does now, as he approaches 50 and embraces what could, albeit reductively, be called his Hot, Crazy Dad period.

Theroux is not a father in real life—nor is he, as far as I know, authentically unhinged—but he played a Hot, Crazy Dad to unforgettable effect in HBO’s haunting philosophical drama The Leftovers. His role in The Mosquito Coast, an action-packed adaptation of his uncle Paul Theroux’s popular 1981 novel that debuts on April 30, puts a less sympathetic spin on the archetype. And while this updated take on the story doesn’t come close to delivering on its lofty thematic ambitions, Theroux’s dynamic, layered performance transcends the cluttered script.

Paul Theroux’s book, which was adapted as a feature film in 1986, is an allegory for the vicious circle of colonialism nested within an adventure narrative. A genius inventor who dropped out of Harvard, protagonist Allie Fox lives on the margins of American society with his adoring family and nurses a cranky, self-serving obsession with consumerism. (Theroux’s bone-deep embodiment of this character illustrates just how miscast Harrison Ford was in the movie.) Also, he’s created a machine that can transform fire into ice, but nobody cares because there’s plenty of frozen water in the U.S. So the Foxes light out to the Central American jungle, where Allie exploits cheap land, abundant natural resources and cooperative locals to create his ideal society—creating the ultimate test case for his invention and, in effect, restarting the cycle of industrialization he’s trying to escape. As the family’s circumstances devolve, what began in the vein of Robinson Crusoe or Huckleberry Finn starts to look more like Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

L-R: Melissa George, Logan Polish, Gabriel Bateman and Paul Theroux in ‘The Mosquito Coast’

It would be tough to tell precisely this story today, in part because of how much the geopolitical conversation has complexified over the past four decades and in part because, although Allie is the butt of its satire, it relies on what Disney+ has notoriously euphemized as “outdated cultural depictions.” So writer Neil Cross (Luther), who adapted the book for TV with Tom Bissell, was wise to make major plot adjustments. In Apple’s seven-episode series, Theroux’s Allie is still a self-righteous, anti-American eco-MacGyver who can’t sell his fire-to-ice converter. (Did he pitch George R.R. Martin?) But this time, he and wife Margot (Melissa George) have spent a decade or so on the run from the government following some mega-crime that remains unknown to viewers—and to the Foxes’ children. While her little brother Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) hangs on Allie’s every boast, 15-year-old Dina (Logan Polish, excellent) is growing increasingly frustrated that her parents’ off-the-grid lifestyle prevents her from doing such normal-teenager things as spending hours on a cellphone with her boyfriend. She really isn’t pleased when, with the feds suddenly hot on their trail again, her father forces the family to bolt for the southern border.

This Mosquito Coast becomes a fugitive road-trip tale, with Allie enlisting coyotes to smuggle the Foxes into Mexico, where he hopes to find sanctuary for the family with a shadowy network of outlaws. In doing so, he places his family in grave danger and leaves a long trail of bodies in his wake. There are conspicuous echoes of our ongoing immigration disaster, the War on Drugs and the climate crisis. As in the original, Allie is a man disgusted by American chauvinism who can nonetheless never escape it because he epitomizes it, in his own selfishness, ego, reliance on manipulation and seeming lack of comprehension that other people are discrete human beings with their own justifiable needs and preferences. This much is clear within the first few hours, but instead of deepening the metaphor as it progresses, the show simply repeats itself.

That leaves time for multiple action sequences, as well as multiple scenes of various Foxes being lost, scared and alone in the world, in every episode. Both can feel like time wasters. Unmoored from its source material, The Mosquito Coast can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a white-knuckle thrill ride, a character-driven family drama, a high-minded critique of 21st-century America, or—once we’re introduced to a cartel assassin who’s dressed like Walter White in his all-black Heisenberg getup and flanked by a neo-Dickensian army of child urchins—a second-rate Breaking Bad. The show gets so wrapped up in building suspense that its finale lands with an infuriating thud, leaving crucial questions unanswered and central relationships unresolved. It ends so abruptly, I had to double-check the press notes to be sure I hadn’t missed an episode.

Apple TV+Justin Theroux and Melissa George in ‘The Mosquito Coast’

This is a series that’s always tantalizing viewers with glimpses of profundity—in its political commentary, its plot complexity, its character development. But only in Theroux’s performance does The Mosquito Coast transcend the superficial. During his anti-society soapbox rants Allie can come across as a raving loon of the most dangerous sort, yet in this rendering he’s also charming and brainy enough to suggest why Margot didn’t just grab the kids and run years ago. He’s more than a standard TV narcissist, however; he rarely falls apart when anyone questions him, and is in fact at his gentlest and most patient after someone, usually Dina, betrays him. And he seems to sincerely believe he loves his family, even if he thinks too highly of his own intelligence to value their perspectives on technology or consumerism or whether it’s a good idea to plunder the belongings of a bunch of migrant corpses they stumble upon in the desert.

Within the first 15 minutes of the premiere, viewers get a pretty thorough sense of Allie’s values. And it’s through Theroux that we, more gradually, come to understand the show’s conflicted depiction of Allie. The lingering question is also the most important one: where do Cross and Bissell ultimately come down on consumerism or technology or any other aspect of contemporary American life? Maybe such candor is too much to ask of a show created for a platform owned by one of the world’s most valuable corporations. Sadly, the alternative leaves us with a commercial for thinking about America more than a complete thought.

Today news: Roy Andersson’s Quietly Gorgeous About Endlessness Explores Questions for Which There Are No Answers

Swedish director Roy Andersson’s About Endlessness is a scroll of 1,000 questions that would fit in a walnut shell, a seemingly unassuming movie that might dredge up feelings you didn’t know you had. It’s meditative, mournful and gently funny, and celebratory, too, but in a muted way. If you don’t know what kind of movie you’re in the mood for, this may be the one. It’s a tonic for listless times.

About Endlessness doesn’t tell a single story. Instead, it glides from one vignette to another, carried along by the matter-of-fact observations of an unseen female narrator (Jessica Louthander), a tributary moving toward some larger reservoir of ideas: “I saw a man with his mind elsewhere,” she says, as we watch an elderly waiter who seems to be lost in time pour red wine into the glass of a portly, well-dressed businessman. Only he doesn’t stop pouring—the wine glugs into the glass well past the point of overflowing. Seeing what he’s done, he dabs at the stained white tablecloth with silent desperation, as if his brain had only just returned from its short out-of-body jaunt.

What does this wordless miniature mean? None of About Endlessness is easy to explain in words, yet somehow the images, and the spare strands of dialogue accompanying them, unlock some of the little doors behind which we keep our own anxieties and longings. If you’ve seen Andersson’s 2014 A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, you’ll be prepared for this movie’s dandelion puffs of off-kilter humor, and for its deadpan exploration of the textures of everyday living. For most of us, in between moments of despair and joy, there are long stretches of just getting by. But maybe those are the moments that would tell a stranger the most about us: One of the sketches in About Endlessness shows a man who, wary of banks, keeps his savings in his mattress. In another, we see a woman wheeling a baby carriage whose heel has broken off her shoe, a momentarily perplexing problem she must find a way to solve. The movie’s images are rendered in soft, suedelike tones, mauves and grays and shadowy taupes, colors that speak of either giving up or hanging on, depending on your mood. These aren’t definitive colors; there are questions baked into them.

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Most of the movie’s tableaus—like the one featuring the distracted waiter—are one-offs. Hitler even makes a guest appearance. But there’s one story that connects all these vessels into a loosely unified flotilla: A man (Martin Serner) awakens from a nightmare in which he’s forced to carry a heavy wooden cross through the streets, while being flogged and ridiculed by spectators. His wife tries, and fails, to comfort him. We later see him in the office of a psychiatrist (Bengt Bergius), where he lays his suffering bare. He fears he’s losing his faith in God. This is significant, because we now see, from his clerical collar, that he’s a priest.

The doctor, who has been listening patiently, responds with the understatement of the year: “That’s not a pleasant situation, I must say.” The priest’s story unfolds gradually, with other stories nestled between its chapters. He gets drunk on communion wine and stumbles through the Eucharist. Later—in a scene staged like a low-key riff on a Marx Brothers routine—his words stream out in an anguished, quavering wail: “What should I do now that I’ve lost my faith?” It’s terrible, but it’s also disquietingly funny. Andersson is expert at framing those moments when we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Is About Endlessness a bummer? Perhaps a little. But it’s also delicately rapturous, as attuned to life’s eternally blossoming beauty as to its cruelty. The movie’s most enduring image is that of a man and woman—wearing what appears to be 19th or early 20th century dress—wrapped in one another’s arms, floating through the grayed skies high above a cityscape. Our narrator friend explains what we’re seeing, to the degree that it can ever be explained: “I saw a couple, two lovers, floating above a city renowned for its beauty but now in ruins.”

A city in ruins is a distressing sight, a tragedy most of us would want to turn away from. But these lovers are calm. They’ve created their own dream, and it’s enough to hold them aloft. They might be ghosts, which would mean they’re no longer troubled by the same questions that nag at us living humans. There’s freedom in that—but for now, aren’t we better off being alive and eager to ask the questions? That’s the conclusion Andersson moves toward. His movie is like a gentle but powerful tornado that picks you up in one place and sets you down in another. Where am I? How did I get here? Can I go back to where I was before? Our questions run circles around themselves, through our whole lifetimes, but maybe the questions are answers by themselves. You can’t make peace with wonder.

Today news: What to Know About the Real-Life Inspiration Behind Netflix’s Things Heard & Seen

Within the first few minutes of the new Netflix film Things Heard & Seen, it’s clear something has gone very wrong. A man (James Norton) is seen pulling into the garage of an old home in the countryside. As he cuts the ignition on his car, a red droplet appears from above, falling onto his dashboard. He exits the car, looks up, sees liquid seeping through the floorboards and rushes inside the house, where a young girl is expectantly waiting for him. He scoops her up in his arms, and begins to run.

What happened in that house? That question is at the center of Things Heard & Seen, which then rewinds to the previous spring and unpacks all that led up to this mysterious moment. The ‘80s-set thriller, which drops on the streaming platform on April 29, follows a young family—Catherine Clare (Amanda Seyfried), her husband George (Norton) and their daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger)—as they relocate from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley north of the city, where George has just landed a teaching position at a nearby college. The Clares move into an old dairy farm with a complicated history—one that George failed to mention to his wife when they purchased it.

From there, things get messy. George is quick to start building their new lives around his art history career while Catherine feels increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. In the house, she begins to notice strange and creepy artifacts, which leads her on a journey to figure out the property’s past and the brutalities that took place there. The movie is based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 book All Things Cease to Appear and is directed by the married filmmaker team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. In an interview with Netflix, Springer Berman said that she was drawn to the story because of Brundage’s ability to depict the realities of a marriage alongside the supernatural elements of the farm house. “It was creepy and frightening and engaging and also beautifully written and extremely literary with beautiful character descriptions,” she said. “It looked in a very honest way at the terror and the beauty of a marriage.”

Here’s what you need to know about the origins of Things Heard & Seen, from Brundage’s novel to the real-life murder that inspired the story.

(Spoilers ahead for All Things Cease to Appear and Things Heard & Seen)

What to know about All Things Cease to Appear

While both the book and movie have the same premise, there are key differences in their structures. The novel begins on more explicit terms: Catherine is dead, George has just arrived on his neighbor’s doorstep with Franny in tow, and he becomes the primary suspect in her murder. Brundage introduces flashbacks that reveal the fissures in the Clares’ marriage—a tension that isn’t made clear in the film until later on. Brundage flips between timelines as she unveils the tragedies that came before them in the house they moved into in upstate New York.

Anna Kooris/NETFLIX—© NETFLIX, Inc.Amanda Seyfried as the increasingly isolated Catherine Clare in ‘Things Heard & Seen’

When the book debuted in 2016, Brundage was praised for elevating a standard thriller plot into something more. TIME’s review of the book applauded the author’s literary skills: “Brundage’s language is the real draw, with her vivid portraits of spouses on opposite sides of a brutal abyss.” In his review for The Wall Street Journal, Tom Nolan appreciated how the book was not easily categorized. “Is the book a ‘police procedural?’ In part. A ‘gothic mystery?’ Incidentally. A novel of ‘psychological suspense?’ In spades,” Nolan wrote.

Beyond providing more concrete details in the beginning of the narrative, Brundage also includes more context about the history of the home as well as the impact of Catherine’s murder on her daughter’s life. The last section of All Things Cease to Appear is set decades in the future, in 2004, where Franny is a third-year surgical resident going through the motions. She receives a phone call that she has to return home because the farm has finally been sold. “When she was a child her questions were ignored, and even now, as an adult they’ve never been answered,” Brundage wrote. “Nobody on her father’s side talks about her mother.” By the novel’s end, Franny is left longing for the mother she never got to know and is disturbed by how much she doesn’t remember about the life they once shared together.

The book is loosely based on a true story

The inspiration for All Things Cease to Appear comes from the time Brundage spent living in upstate New York with her young family. Her husband had recently joined a local medical practice and she happened upon an old home for rent, which she was so struck by that the family decided to sign a lease, according to Brundage’s website. But they soon “discovered that we were not alone” when Brundage’s daughters, at just three and six years old, began telling stories about ghosts that lived in the house, specifically three girls who died in a fire there. “They knew details that seemed beyond their ability to fabricate, including the names of the ghosts, and historic details about an old mill down the road with tainted water,” Brundage wrote. “One night, my youngest was literally laughing at something that seemed to be moving around the room. She pointed at it, giggling, I couldn’t see it. But I could feel it, I just knew.”

Anna Kooris/NETFLIX—© NETFLIX, Inc.James Norton as George Clare and Amanda Seyfried as Catherine Clare in ‘Things Heard & Seen’

After moving in, a neighbor warned Brundage that the house was haunted and its last owner moved away as a result. “On Halloween, I turned on my computer and the printer started printing out a skeleton head made up of the word Boo. This was before the Internet—the only thing running through the computer was electricity,” Brundage said in an interview with Mom Advice. As spooky instances began to mount, the author found herself reconsidering how she thought about ghosts. “Unlike the usual stuff of horror movies, the experience sort of opened me up to the possibilities of ghosts as haunted souls rather than monstrous forces of evil,” she told the Book Trail in 2016.

Those experiences ended up shaping All Things Cease to Appear, which was also inspired by the 1982 murder of Cathleen Krauseneck, a woman who was found dead in her bedroom with an ax in her head while her 3-year-old daughter was alive elsewhere in the house. Brundage recently told Democrat & Chronicle that the disturbing details of the killing stuck with her: “The thing that really motivated me to explore the (homicide) case as the potential architecture for a book were those long hours that this little girl was alone with her mother.”

Making the movie

Directors Springer Berman and Pulcini, who also wrote the screenplay, have a home in the Hudson Valley, and shot the movie there in 2019. “We love the landscape and the history and we are big fans of the Hudson River school of artists,” Pulcini told the Journal News, referring to the group of American landscape painters from the 19th century. “I mean, it is something that we always talked about, what type of movie would we film here.” The rural landscape provides an eerie backdrop for Things Heard & Seen, which joins a slate of movies and television shows filmed in the region, including parts of the HBO miniseries The Undoing and John Krasinski’s 2018 film A Quiet Place.

Anna Kooris/NETFLIX—© 2020 Netflix, Inc.In ‘Things Heard & Seen,’ Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) discovers the history of her haunted home

What also stood out to the filmmakers in adapting the book was the feminist bent of the story. Like many stories in classic literature, this one is centered on an isolated woman who is believed by nobody when she expresses concern over the haunted happenings inside her home. “A lot of those books were about female power and the suppression of female power,” Pulcini said. “This was similar, but kind of turned on its head—the supernatural, the house. It has a lot of those Gothic elements you see in Turn of the Screw, but it also did something different, something that I had never seen. It covered new territory.”