Film and TV News for the Week of October 28, 2022

OCTOBER 28, 2022

THE LITERARY FILM AND TV YOU NEED TO STREAM IN NOVEMBER

Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to watch? Well, whatever you want, of course, but the name of this website is Literary Hub, so we sort of have an angle. To that end, here’s a selection of the best (and most enjoyably bad) literary film and TV coming to streaming services this month. Have fun.

Master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s gorgeous drama stars French actress Nathalie Boutefou in a powerhouse performance as writer Sophia Tolstoy. The moving, dynamic script, co-written by Wiseman and Boutefou, was adapted from both Sophia’s diaries and the turbulent letters she exchanged with her husband, Leo Tolstoy. In French with English subtitles.

Buy your tickets now.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Viola Prettejohn, Tracey Ullman, and Kelly Macdonald will star in the series adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go • Oscar-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross has been tapped to direct a feature adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys for MGM’s Orion Pictures • FX has given a pilot green light to The Bends, a drama based on the novel Killing Ground by Gerald Seymour • Paul Mescal will play the lead in espionage thriller A Spy by Nature, based on the first novel in Charles Cumming’s bestselling Alec Milius spy series • Downton Abbey star Jessica Brown Findlay is leading a podcast based on Joseph Conrad’s 1911 spy thriller Under Western Eyes • Netflix has revealed the launch date and poster art for its adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

STRONGLY RECOMMEND

SAM RAIMI’S PLAYFUL TRILOGY

I’m lucky that my turn to *Strongly Recommend* falls on Halloween Friday. After much deliberation, I think you should watch Sam Raimi’s wonderful Evil Dead trilogy: The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), and Army of Darkness (1992). I love movies that look very handmade (especially when they are horror, a genre in which increasing the verisimilitude correspondingly increases the chance I’ll be traumatized). Evil Dead, a low-budget horror movie made by Raimi and his friends, isn’t scary-scary for me because it’s so makeshift, and the other two aren’t scary-scary because they are so experimental and formally playful. Number 1 is about five college kids who go to a cabin in the woods and accidentally awaken some demons who take over their bodies, turning them into possessed zombies. It’s a little gross, but it’s extremely creative. The second one, which is half sequel and half redo, basically reworks the first movie in another genre: slapstick comedy. And in the third one, Army of Darkness (which was evidently supposed to be called MEDIEVAL DEAD), our hero finds himself fighting the same demons in yet another genre’s setting: a medieval fantasy epic. Happy Halloween!

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

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