“What do you think it is about Cassius that makes him able to do things that other men find impossible?” Malcolm X (Michael Ealy) asks Muhammad Ali’s stalwart trainer, Angelo Dundee (Giovanni Ribisi), in Prime Video’s stylistically conventional yet unusually insightful The Greatest. “What spark inside him makes him so different from other people?”

These questions fuel the series, streaming in full on Nov. 4, which finds in the relative newcomer Jaalen Best an ideal young Cassius Clay, a bold boxing phenom on a quest to become the heavyweight champion of the world—and a spiritual journey that will change both his faith and his name. There are reasons to be skeptical of this show. It counts his widow, Lonnie Ali, among its executive producers. (Michael B. Jordan, who played the Ali-esque title character in the Creed movies, is another.) Such projects can default to hagiography. And Ali has already been portrayed many times on screen. But creator Ben Watkins (Cross) doesn’t dodge the tougher aspects of his subject’s life. What justifies this retelling is not only the care he and Best take in recounting what Ali achieved, but also conveying what made him capable of greatness.

The Greatest is bookended by career highlights: the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Ali won gold at 18, and his first heavyweight championship in 1964. That fight, against Sonny Liston, must be his most extensively documented moment. Michael Mann opened his 2001 biopic Ali, starring Will Smith, with an immersive restaging of the match. Regina King’s 2020 film One Night in Miami imagines its afterparty, a meeting of the minds between Eli Goree’s Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. In ending where these predecessors begin, the series traces how the upstart Cassius Clay crafted Muhammad Ali, the legend.

Best’s Ali reads as a significantly younger man than the versions in Mann’s and King’s movies. Instead of detracting from his astonishing self-possession, Cassius’ fresh face makes those qualities seem more remarkable. Upon his return from Italy, where he enjoyed a relative reprieve from anti-Black racism, to his segregated hometown of Louisville, Ky., he is again a teenager in his parents’ humble household. He has a mutually adoring bond with his mother, Odessa (Dana Gourrier, excellent), a domestic servant who wants nothing fancier than to give her children a better life. His father, Cash (Omari Hardwick), had dreams of becoming a great artist but settled for painting signs and drowning his disappointment in alcohol and women. Cassius’ younger brother Rudy (Kai Parham) is also a boxer. But any rivalry is outweighed by Rudy’s sincere wish to help a sibling he recognizes as a generational talent.

An 18-year-old rocketing to the top of a lucrative sport is sure to meet many people eager to buy stock in his future. Especially if he is Black and working-class, he’ll be treated as though he owes them something. As he prepares to go pro, Cassius is swarmed by this type. “I knew you had the skill,” one tells the gold medalist. “Wasn’t sure you had the work ethic.” The prejudice underlying this comment would be obvious even if we didn’t see Cassius exhaust himself in training sessions. But he knows he deserves respect, and he refuses to work with anyone, Black or white, who tries to humble him. This can look like arrogance, but it’s also an accurate self-assessment. As Angelo puts it: “You don’t teach Michelangelo how to paint.”

How does a person as systemically disadvantaged as Cassius come to believe so fervently in himself? Watkins offers three compelling explanations, all implied through his behavior rather than overstated via exposition. One is the strength of his will—his innate ability to tune out skeptics and distractions. Another is his mother and brother’s unwavering love, which counteracts the hatred he experiences. Finally, in rare instances when his poise wavers, he can fall back on the rhyming, boasting showmanship he gleans from the flamboyant pro wrestling heel Gorgeous George (WWE alum Chris Jericho, in an apt cameo).

Cassius’ singular personality is thrown into relief by Sonny (Amin Joseph), who is depicted as his antithesis in life as in the ring. An ex-con and abuse survivor, he has internalized every monstrous caricature of Black manhood Cassius actively resists. Even as the champ, with the love and guidance of a canny wife (Erica Tazel), he’s poisoned by self-hatred. Ultimately, he behaves like the beast a racist press makes him out to be. Watkins lets us sit in discomfort, watching Cassius use the same stereotypes (“big, ugly bear”) to taunt Sonny.

The Greatest rarely deviates from the bio-drama template, with its archetypal hero’s journey. But the approach suits this story of a man figuring out who he is and what he values through a noble quest. It’s when the show tries to loosen up, as in boxing montages scored to energetic hip-hop that feel like Gatorade ads, that it rings false. It occasionally struggles to balance complex truths. On the Nation of Islam, it makes clear-eyed distinctions between Malcolm X, framed as a true mentor to Cassius, and the tactics of polarizing Nation leader Elijah Muhammad (Hill Harper). Yet in illustrating why Cassius chooses the Nation’s militance over turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, hurting his mother in the process, it minimizes the Black church’s centrality to the civil rights struggle.

Even so, as it distinguishes Malcolm from Elijah, Odessa from Cash, Angelo from a legion of white guys with dollar-sign eyes, and most of all Cassius from Sonny, The Greatest builds a strong case for integrity as the key ingredient of greatness. A hero of Ali’s magnitude doesn’t just embody that virtue. He demands it from the people who surround him.

If it seems like no one else could play the role John Turturro plays in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, you can imagine the angst writer-director Noah Segan felt when he sent the screenplay to the actor hoping for a “yes.” Turturro brings world-weariness, tenderness, and New York City street smarts to his turn as Harry, a career criminal whose way of life is disappearing in a cashless, electronic, often colder world. The character may steal to put food on his table, but he’s also loyal and honest in his own way, caring for a permanently disabled wife and practically a saint when compared with the tech-enabled, mafia nepo baby (Will Price) he makes the mistake of stealing from, setting off the movie’s drama and putting his life in jeopardy.

Turturro, who has been a ubiquitous presence in film, TV, and theater for decades, truly seems to be everywhere these days—in an acclaimed production heading for Broadway, in Severance, whose fans eagerly await a third season, in the forthcoming climate-change dramedy A Statement from Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, and of course anywhere the Knicks are. With Pickpocket, he could very well land his first Oscar nomination in a career full of performances that have certainly qualified for consideration, from Barton Fink to Quiz Show to more Spike Lee films than any other actor has appeared in. 

Ahead of the theatrical release of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which hit theaters nationwide on Oct. 30, Turturro spoke to TIME about how his hometown has changed, his love for collaborators old and new, and his nerves heading into this year’s NBA season.

Read more: John Turturro Gives a Career-Best Performance in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

Noah Segan said that when he came to meet you, “We had some soup and fell in love.” Did you need to be convinced to take the part?

I read so many scripts, and so many of them are derivative. Sometimes they're just violent for violence's sake. Someone's seen you do something, and they say, "Well, he could do this.” I said, "Is this as good as I think it is?” I was struck by the structure of it, because I love Greek plays. I love that Aristotelian 24-hour time frame, when something has tension and propulsive movement, an odyssey to survive in a short time, and then it's juxtaposed with this tenderness and the specificity of language. I met Noah, and I liked him. He's a gentle guy, but he has a backbone. When Noah gave me the script, it's like a gift. You want to reciprocate. You want to surprise that person.

Harry is a criminal, but he operates by a code. He’s true to his word. He’s loyal to his wife. Do you see him as an antihero? 

I just try to play a person. I’ve read about a lot of these guys. They were from broken homes, orphanages. They didn’t have a family, so they formed this little family with other people who didn’t want to hurt people. Even though it is a violation, it was nonviolent. It was like a magic trick. They’re taking something. But there’s a lot of people who pick our pockets every day. And they take our world sometimes. 

The movie has a real nostalgia for the old New York, a more analog time. Do you share that feeling? 

Everything changes. You walk down Bleecker Street, all these theaters, nightclubs are gone. It’s CVS. Ethnic neighborhoods aren’t there anymore. It takes away from the texture of a neighborhood. The thing I miss is things being affordable. When I was young, even if I sat in the back, I could see anyone. Jimi Hendrix at the Electric Circus. Colleen Dewhurst or George C. Scott. I got an education that way, while I was getting a [formal] education, and it opened up my horizons of thinking someday I could make a living doing this. 

The city also feels different from decades past because we’re all staring down at our phones instead of looking at each other as we walk down the street.

There's so many people. We're all going somewhere. And there's plenty of people that aren't there. There's a lot of people gone now from all different generations, and you're more and more surrounded by ghosts. In my phone, I don't take people out because maybe I need the number in the afterlife or something. You just understand that there is a clock to our lives, and what you give is also important. It's not just what you take, and I believe in that. 

The movie was filmed in every borough, right? It doesn’t feel like a gimmick, but something that could plausibly happen in this character’s life.

The guy is sort of a superhero. He knows the transit lines, the buses, the subways. He doesn't take Ubers. I take subways and I walk everywhere. I love it when I go to an event and everyone's sharing that on the train. It’s kind of about the underbelly, the people keep the city humming. Even though this is not a film about the working class, it is, sort of. The elevator doesn't work. The heat isn't so great. These are real problems, and those people sometimes are not explored as much.

There’s a wonderful scene where Harry dances to the song “Native New Yorker” for his wife Rosie, who is disabled and non-verbal. Was that improvised? 

I like to dance. I studied dance. In my household, everybody was dancing, three boys, my mom was a great dancer. I used to go out dancing to that song. When people are incapacitated, you play music, you sing, you dance. It’s a love scene. Movement, especially when it’s not overly choreographed, brings joy. Even in intense stories, people stop to do things. They stop to eat. They stop to have a laugh. 

You go way back with two of your co-stars, Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a detective who’s almost like a colleague of Harry’s, and Steve Buscemi, who owns the pawn shop where he brings his stolen wares. How did that come about? Did you suggest them? 

Yeah, we talked about it, and I asked Giancarlo to read it. And Steve and I know each other. We've been neighbors. He's a beautiful guy. He's a beautiful actor. We have a history there, so it's not like we have to invent that. So that was helpful in the movie.

You and Tatiana Maslany, who’s also in this film, just finished the play Rhinoceros together. Do you like to get back to the theater every once in a while to sort of sharpen the tools? 

That’s where I come from. I love the rehearsal process, if it’s a very open one, which we did in Rhinoceros with [director] Diane Paulus. We explored everything. It’s exhausting, I don’t want to do a run for half a year. But I love doing things that young people can come to and afford. It’s real teamwork, and I think it’s kept me fresh for doing film work. It’s humbling, and it’s nerve-racking, and it’s also exhilarating when you’re able to keep your balance.

There’s so much love for your character Irving on Severance. And fans really obsess over this show with conspiracy theories. Have you been a part of something like that before? 

I love Irving too. I have enjoyed working with the entire group, and especially with the apple of my eye, Chris [Walken]. Severance poses questions of work life, personal life. Maybe it resonates in the world. Maybe even more now with all this AI stuff. I think one of the strengths of the show is that it poses these questions and doesn’t answer them. When you answer it, it’s not as satisfying as figuring it out.

As a prominent Knicks fan, how are you feeling about this season? 

I feel hopeful. I’m not overconfident. It was beautiful how they all coalesced. I treasure being a fan and a season-ticket holder. I’m still soaking it all in. My favorite thing was coming home on the train, everyone just being in shock. It’s great when people come together.

Correction, Oct. 30

The original version of this story misstated which season of Severance is forthcoming. It will be the third season, not the fourth.

In the wet heat of a Guadalcanal afternoon on Christmas Eve 1944, two regiments of the 6th Marine Division met on a football field of packed earth and broken coral. They had come to settle a question argued over beer: Which of them had the better team? The island where the Pacific War’s first major American offensive was fought had been quiet for nearly two years, a staging ground of tents and supply depots where men trained and waited and swatted at the insects that gave the island’s Armed Forces Radio network its name. The game was a serious to-do: There were printed programs, numbered T-shirts, goalposts the Marines built themselves, and an announcer whose call went out over the Mosquito Network to men on ships and islands across the Pacific. At least 1,500 Marines lined the field, some with money on the outcome. Neither team scored. Three months later, the division sailed for Okinawa, an island on Japan’s doorstep, where 15 of the 65 men who played that day were killed. 

That game is the short reprieve at the heart of Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl, in select theaters Oct. 30 and arriving Nov. 25 on Netflix. Directed by Berg, who wrote the screenplay with Mark L. Smith, the film adapts Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger’s book and follows four of those players from the Saturday afternoons when the best of their lives still seemed to lie ahead, through weeks of training that could not prepare them for what came next, to one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Nicholas Galitzine plays John McLaughry, alongside Tom Francis as Dave Schreiner, Bill Skarsgård as Bob Bauman, and Ray Nicholson as Tony Butkovich. Three of those men would die on Okinawa. The fourth would live to 90.

The stadiums give way to boot camp, boot camp to the reef at Tarawa, Tarawa to the long crossing toward Okinawa, where the familiar idea of victory becomes a contest with no whistle, no clock, and survival as the only trophy. What the film is after, once the pageantry is stripped away, is that moment of recognition: young men who thought they had been sent to win learning what they have really been sent to do.

Berg has made films (and a massively popular TV show) about football and films about war. Here the same young men must do both. “They got out there and very quickly found that it wasn’t a game,” Berg tells TIME. “They weren’t really qualified for it, but they were going to do their very best. The tragedy is the death of that innocence.”

The lives before the uniforms

What the four men shared, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was an assumption. Their country had been attacked, and young men like them were expected to go to war.

Schreiner, from Lancaster, Wisconsin, had twice been named an All-American in his career with the University of Wisconsin; in 1942 he was named the Big Ten’s most valuable player, and the Detroit Lions drafted him. The letters he left behind, now at the Wisconsin Historical Society, show a more private side of the star athlete. He was engaged to Odette Hendrickson, wrote to her and to his parents constantly and judged himself without mercy. “Tightly, tightly woven,” Bissinger says of the man. Francis found in him a care and a vulnerability that colored everything, and a mind that would not rest. “He overthinks everything, but then as soon as one of his brothers comes to him and isn’t quite there, he just can find a way to be like, ‘I’ve got you,’” the actor says.

Schreiner had options. “Dave could have gotten out of it because of who he was,” Bissinger says. “He could have easily been a phys ed instructor somewhere at one of the bases in the United States, and he said, ‘No, I got to go. My friends are going. I’m just sitting around doing nothing, and I can’t live with that.’”

The man who kept Schreiner loose was his teammate Bob Bauman, a tackle from Harvey, Ill. Bauman’s father died when he was a boy, and he grew up holding his family together. “Bob was more happy-go-lucky,” Bissinger says. When Schreiner tightened up, Bauman’s advice, as the author renders it, came down to a single line: “Dave, don’t overthink, Dave.” The two enlisted within months of each other and would serve in the same company.

Butkovich was the son of Croatian immigrants who settled in a coal town in central Illinois. He played two seasons at Illinois before the Marines sent him to Purdue, where he rushed for 833 yards in seven games in 1943. The team went undefeated, but the Marines called him away before the season ended, and he cried in the locker room over having to go. The Cleveland Rams made him a first-round pick in 1944, and he kept up a pen-pal correspondence with a 9-year-old fan. “He was really on this high level,” says Nicholson of Butkovich’s stature as a football star. “But at the same time, he was a mama’s boy.”

The oldest of the four, McLaughry was the only one already out of college. His father, Tuss McLaughry, coached at Brown, and John captained his father’s team in 1939 before playing a season for the New York Giants. He also painted. “Steady, solid, almost a Renaissance man,” Bissinger says. Galitzine was drawn to both McLaughry’s intellect and his artistic sensibility. He and Berg discussed McLaughry’s “ability to intellectualize things and how that kind of dissipates, given the trauma and the grotesque violence that he sees,” the actor recalls. What remains is a sense of duty more immediate than politics. “The loyalty you have really is not even to your nation necessarily, or to the men who send you to war, but it’s to your brothers who are in the foxhole next to you,” Galitzine says.

By the autumn of 1944, the war had brought all four to Guadalcanal. Though the film has them all in the same regiment, in reality, Schreiner, Bauman, and McLaughry were officers in the 4th Marines, and Butkovich served in the 29th, the other regiment on the field that Christmas Eve.

The game they made for themselves

Bissinger first learned of the Mosquito Bowl by chance, through a passing mention he found while working on another book. “It sounded ludicrous to me and totally unimaginable,” he says. A program survived, with both teams’ rosters, and then he learned that all but one of the men on them had since died. The lives behind those names emerged from what their families had kept: letters, report cards, pictures drawn in childhood.

The game stemmed from an argument. The former college players in the 29th were sure they could beat the former college players in the 4th. The rosters held three All-Americans, seven former captains, and close to 20 men who had been drafted by NFL teams or would go on to play in the league. By December, the regiments had drilled for months, and the drilling had gone stale; men were getting antsy, Bissinger says, and antsy men “get this thousand-yard stare.” The division’s commander, Major General Lemuel Shepherd, was looking for a way to lift their spirits. “When morale flags, Marines get worried,” Bissinger explains, reconstructing the general’s reasoning. “They preoccupy themselves with death, and we need some diversion.” Shepherd approved the game, and the Marines worked hard to make it resemble the real thing. “This was about joy,” Bissinger says. “It was about doing something that they loved, that for many of them would be the last thing they would ever do that they loved.”

Little of the game itself survives: the date, the printed program, a few photographs, and a final score of 0-0. The men wore T-shirts and cut-off dungarees. Nobody stuck to the intended mode of touch football for long, and the coral in the dirt drew blood. What matters about the Mosquito Bowl is not anything that happened on the field but that it happened at all, an afternoon in which the war paused and these men got to be what they had been raised to be. “The football of it all never really mattered. I think it wasn’t about who scored what, what tackle here, who had this many rushing yards,” Berg says. “It must have given them an opportunity in the middle of this descent into hell to stop, to get out of hell, to be free again, to be young again, and just play a game. That’s what kind of hooked me on Buzz’s book, and that’s what we tried to recreate.”

In the film, the game plays as a respite, beautiful and painful at once: everything they get back is exactly what the war will take. Most of the plays are lost, and Berg is untroubled by it. “I don’t even know what the score of the game is in our movie. I truly don’t know,” he says. “You ask me who won. I don’t know. Was it a tie? I think so. Did they have fun? Yes.”

There would be no rematch. On March 15, 1945, the division sailed from Guadalcanal, by way of the Navy anchorage at Ulithi, for Okinawa.

What Okinawa took

On the morning of April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday, the Americans came ashore on the western beaches of Okinawa, 350 miles south of mainland Japan, in the largest landing of the Pacific War. The defenders did not meet them at the beaches; they had dug into the ridges and limestone caves of the island’s southern third and waited. The 6th Marine Division swept north, cleared the island’s northern reaches in three weeks, then turned around and marched south.

The rains came in late May, and for days they did not stop. The roads dissolved, supplies went forward on men’s backs, and the wounded came back the same way. The terraced hills were cut with caves and family tombs the Japanese had turned into firing positions, so that an advance of a few hundred yards could last an entire day of sealing holes with dynamite and flame. Civilians hid in the same caves the soldiers fought from, and many died in them too. By late June, more than 12,000 Americans were dead or missing and nearly three times as many wounded. The Japanese defenders, told not to surrender, mostly did not. The Okinawans are the ones no one can count; estimates of the civilian dead run from about 94,000 to more than 140,000. The Cornerstone of Peace at the island’s southern tip carries more than 240,000 names, soldiers and civilians from every side, and names are still being added.

The worst of it came at a hill the Marines called Sugar Loaf. It stood only some 50 feet high, but it sat between the division and Naha, the island’s capital, and Japanese guns covered it from three directions. It changed hands again and again, and in the 10 days before the Marines finally held it, on May 18, more than 2,600 men from the division were killed or wounded. Three days before the hill fell, George Murphy, the former captain of Notre Dame, who had played in the Mosquito Bowl the previous Christmas Eve, was leading a platoon of the 29th Marines on its slopes.

As Bissinger tells it, Murphy was ordered to make another assault and protested. “We don’t have enough hand grenades,” he said. He would fight for his country, but this was a death assignment. “The captain said, ‘I don’t give a sh-t. You got to go up there,’” Bissinger says. The Army’s official history of the campaign tells it slightly differently. In that version, it was Murphy who asked to fall back and his captain who refused: the hill was to be held, whatever the cost. Murphy brought his men down anyway, through the mortar smoke. He stopped for one of the wounded on the way, and a fragment killed him there. Only 11 of his platoon’s 60 men were left. Bissinger, who refused to soften the book’s combat, puts it plainly: “War is not about glory. War is not about heroism. War is about death.”

Butkovich had been dead for a month by then. He was killed on April 18, during the division’s push through the north of the island. He had been on Okinawa less than three weeks. He was 24, the first of the four to die.

Bauman and Schreiner were still paired up. On the morning of June 4, the 4th Marines landed from the sea on the Oroku Peninsula, southwest of Naha. Bauman had been wounded in April and returned to the front. On June 6, his captain went forward with a scouting party, and Company A of the 4th Marines was Bauman’s to lead. He did not lead it long: a Japanese machine gun on the high ground nearby opened fire, and Bauman was killed. Schreiner, a platoon leader in the same company, had two more weeks to live.

There is no agreed-upon account of Schreiner’s final patrol. By June 20, the Japanese defense had collapsed into the island’s southern tip, and the Marines were clearing the last pockets of resistance there. Schreiner was mortally wounded on patrol. Accounts collected by Terry Frei, a chronicler of Schreiner’s Wisconsin team, differ on how: some cite grenade fragments, others a sniper or Japanese soldiers who appeared to surrender before opening fire. He died the following day, June 21, as the battle was drawing to a close. Japan announced its surrender less than two months later. McLaughry, whose platoon of self-propelled guns was supporting Schreiner’s battalion that day, was told at the time that a sniper had shot his friend, and later heard that the bullet had lodged in his spine.

McLaughry fought through all of it and lived. He came home to his wife, raised three children, led the football programs at three colleges, the last of them Brown, and kept painting, but the war stayed with him.

Bringing the men back

Bissinger never met any of the four, though his father, a rifleman in the 4th Marines, fought on Okinawa and never talked about it. “Can you make guys come alive you’ve never met, and never will meet?” he says. He is candid about how he chose them to tell this story: “I picked those people because they had the most readily accessible material.” The McLaughrys kept everything, down to letters John wrote at 4. Schreiner had a niece. Butkovich had a cousin, still living when Bissinger was writing. “Tony had really nothing, so I compiled as much as I could,” he says. “But I felt he had to be in there, particularly since he was the best of the football players.” Their stories reach only as far as their families, and the war, allowed.

The book found its way to the screen through family. Berg and Bissinger are cousins, and The Mosquito Bowl is the second of Bissinger’s books Berg has adapted, after Friday Night Lights. The book follows a wide cast of Marines through several battles; a two-hour film could not, and Berg took his cuts to its author. “I presented my kind of outline to Buzz. I’m like, how would you feel if I did this?” he recalls. “He thought about it, and he said, ‘Do it.’” The film takes dramatic license in places, including a grudge between Schreiner and Butkovich and a battle at Tarawa, the bloody November 1943 assault on a Pacific atoll, where none of the four fought; Marines stranded on a reef under fire was the first image Berg knew the film had to contain. “There were some areas in which Pete had to create his own narrative, and that was going to veer from the book. But that doesn’t bother me, because the essence was there,” Bissinger says.

Berg found his own way in on the ground. He walked Okinawa’s battlefields with Marines stationed there, and came away ready to write.

On set, Berg gave up some of the control a director usually keeps. “I like not being in complete control and allowing something to grow out of that,” he says. Filming in Australia, that meant a director who kept noticing terrain no one had checked. Wildlife handlers cleared the ground before the actors lay in it, Galitzine says, because the local snakes could kill. Berg would look past the cleared area to some unvetted cliff and announce that the actors should climb it. “We just did it,” Galitzine says. Crawling through the Australian bush made the four actors feel as though they were on an adventure together. “It really was an exercise in trust, in a lot of ways.”

Berg had never shot anything like the reef landing. The production put stuntmen, then actors, then camera operators into heavy Australian surf. “You can drown in that surf,” Berg says. “They call that ‘washing machine.’ You’re in the ‘washing machine.’ Think about doing that while you’re being shot at.” Elsewhere, a sand quarry near the coast stood in for the battlefield below Shuri Castle, the Japanese command post at the heart of the island’s defenses. Production designer Philip Ivey scattered scorched books, broken dishes, and clothing across it, the wreckage of ordinary life. The resulting film is intimate and enormous at once, the camera close enough to see fear, with cutaways from the ground to the planet itself that set the men’s suffering inside a scale too large to take in.

In the editing room, the question became how much football the film needed. Early versions spent considerably more time on the game. The finished film instead begins with McLaughry after his experience in combat, before going back to the men’s football years. “The football is there to serve a purpose, and that’s to illustrate that these men were living it up. They were at a good spot in their lives,” Berg says. “So I felt like we needed just enough football to tell that story, and then move on.” The actors trained for much more than made the final cut. Before cameras rolled, they spent weeks in training that was part football practice, part Marine boot camp, each actor drilled at a position, enabling the production to make limited use of stunt doubles.

Four actors, four men

Each of the four actors went looking for the man he was playing, and each found him somewhere different. Francis found his in a joke. The Mosquito Bowl was his first film, and early in the shoot he went to Skarsgård with a stage actor’s questions: Where do I look, what do I do, how do I make it all happen? Skarsgård’s answer was, “You’re overthinking, Schreiner.” Francis heard the character in it. “I was like, this is the man,” he recalls. Skarsgård leaned on the one fact that set Bauman and Schreiner apart from the others. They played beside each other at Wisconsin, joined the Marines a few months apart, and went to war together. “Tom can always come to me and lean on me, and I could always come to lean on him, both as actors, but also as our characters,” Skarsgård says. “The way that they worked was that Bob could pull Dave out.”

Nicholson found his in letters. He read Butkovich as a performer whose confidence was real and whose tenderness ran underneath it. “Once they go through this experience, that version of Tony Butkovich is forever gone,” he says. A five-page handwritten letter Nicholson sent Berg, one the director calls among the “most beautiful” he has ever received, showed him the passion he was casting for. Butkovich’s letters to a young fan, meanwhile, gave the actor a way into the man. Nicholson wrote letters of his own to his father, actor Jack Nicholson, who would have been about that boy’s age during the war. “How do you be someone’s hero?” he asks. “What is that like?” Purdue also sent him restored film of Butkovich with the ball. By chance it came on the anniversary of Butkovich’s death, and Nicholson watched it by himself with the lights off, feeling as if the two of them had somehow met.

Skarsgård went to the place itself. While researching the role, he spent three days on Okinawa with Marine guides, and at the end he asked them to take him to where Bauman was shot. It is in Naha now, a residential neighborhood with a playground and a convenience store. “I’m standing where he took his last breath,” Skarsgård recalls, describing the “immense amount of responsibility” he felt. He was struck by the unlikely connection between his own life and Bauman’s. “Here I am, a Swedish actor, 80 years after this happened, and I’m thinking about this man, and I’m connected with this man, and I feel just so much gratitude towards him.”

Galitzine carried a different weight, the survivor’s, and it came into sharper focus toward the end of filming. The production shot the last scene for Nicholson, Francis, and Skarsgård on a boat, and when it was done, they wrapped and he did not, because McLaughry’s story continued. “There was just this underlying sense of dread, for a lot of the movie, and guilt,” he says. He had spent months alongside the three actors, “knowing that they were going to have to say goodbye in a way that I didn’t.”

The lives that remained

Late in The Mosquito Bowl, in a scene Berg wrote, Schreiner talks with McLaughry on a secluded beach about having children and what a man might leave behind. “The contrast of being in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and then thinking about Dave going through that thought process, it was almost like an out-of-body experience,” Francis says. Galitzine, playing a version of McLaughry beginning to unravel, says that in the scene Schreiner helps “crystallize the reason why they’re doing what they’re doing,” and that Francis’s portrayal gave him “something larger than the chaos and the brutality.”

Schreiner never had those children. Bissinger keeps a photograph of him on his wall, and when he looks at it, he reaches for a word he acknowledges is probably not the right one: waste. “Here was a life that really should have been lived,” he says. “He should have had kids. He should have been married. He should have had a career. He should have had laughter. He should have had glory. He should have had disappointment. All the things that we have in life, and he’s never going to get that.”

The film frames the four men’s lives with a warning and a number: the Herbert Hoover line it opens on, about old men declaring wars the young must fight, and the loss it closes on, 75 million dead worldwide. Berg wants the audience to leave carrying both. “That wasn’t that long ago,” he says. “We live in a very violent planet today, and I really hope that never happens again. I don’t think a movie can change that. But taking a personal responsibility for each and every human being to think about how we can prevent people from having to go kill each other. If we can, let’s do it.”

Against that death toll, four men may seem like nothing. Yet the enormity of the war begins to register through the three lives it cut short and the one it forever changed. Of the dead, traces remain: Schreiner’s letters, Bauman’s snapshots, and restored footage of Butkovich running with the ball. The war left a fuller record of these men than ordinary lives would have, had they simply been allowed to go on living them uninterrupted. Had Schreiner come home, his handwriting might never have left Lancaster.

In the few photographs of the game, young men in T-shirts stand on the makeshift field, the jungle a dark line behind them. For one afternoon on Christmas Eve 1944, nothing was decided. Nobody lost.

McLaughry grew old with the years his friend never had. Then, in 1993, nearly half a century after Okinawa, he wrote out what he could remember of the day Schreiner was hit, a man in his seventies setting down what a young officer had seen, heard, and been told. Much of what he knew had reached him secondhand, and he doubted the version that had settled into the record. He returned to it all the same, because he was the last of the four men who could, and because somewhere on a field of coral in the flat afternoon light, with the ball sailing through the air, the other three were still 23, and in that borrowed moment, always would be.

To paraphrase the old-school comedian Rodney Dangerfield, a pickpocket in 2020s New York gets no respect. Almost no one carries much cash anymore, and credit cards are useless unless you’re willing to commit fraud. What’s a poor guy with crackerjack observational skills and exceedingly dexterous fingers supposed to do when he can’t even pay for his diner breakfast with his morning’s earnings?

That’s where John Turturro’s Harry Lehman finds himself in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, writer-director Noah Segan’s charming, nimble, and affecting drama about a guy who has seen his city, and his world, change drastically during his lifetime. For Harry, a typical workday involves boarding the subway and identifying the easy targets. In his soft, elegant tweed coat—a garment he might have bought 20 or 30 years ago, maybe at Barneys, when the dough was really flowing—he swirls through New York, his vision attuned to checked-out, earbud-wearing Wall Street dudes, or women who allow their purses to dangle precariously. He sees what others miss, though he’s living in a world where no one pays any attention to their environment. It’s a lonely life.

But there’s a bright spot in Harry’s world: Though his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), has been stricken with an unnamed ailment and can neither move nor speak, his days revolve around her. He cares for her tenderly, as best he can, talking to her, laughing with her. At one point he puts Odyssey’s 1977 sequins-and-stardust disco hit “Native New Yorker” on the stereo and dances for both of them, in a kind of disco-salsa shuffle, his arms whirling as if the breeze itself were his dance partner.

Rosie’s care costs money, which means Harry needs to hustle harder than ever. Watches can still bring in the bucks, as long as they’re not fake. And to unload those, Harry has a close pal and longtime co-conspirator, the wily, wisecracking pawnshop owner Ben (Steve Buscemi). Ben will also take stolen phones, though they’re troublesome: they need to go to a guy in Chinatown, Kelvin Han Yee’s Frank, who knows how to scrub them, after which they’re packed into a container and shipped off to god knows where. When Harry boosts a USB crypto wallet from a brazen young criminal and spoiled rich kid, Dylan (Will Price), Ben has no idea what to do with it—plugging it into his circa-1995 desktop personal computer sends the machine into a tailspin. So he sends Harry downtown to see Frank—whose front is a herb shop, though it seems less like a front than a side hustle—and that’s where Harry’s troubles really begin.

The Only Living Pickpocket is part drama, part comedy, part thriller. It’s also a movie about a man reckoning with his past: We may warm to the sight of Harry caring so lovingly for Rosie, but there’s much more to his story, as we learn. And you can’t always tell where the movie is headed; its beats are wriggly, unpredictable. Until recently, writer-director Segan has worked mostly as an actor, often with director Rian Johnson (he appeared in Brick, Looper, and the Knives Out movies), and he has directed one previous feature, the 2022 horror movie Blood Relatives. The pickpocketty lightness of touch he shows is remarkable for a fledgling director.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s got Turturro as a star. In the early part of his career, as a favorite of Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers, Turturro, with his tightly coiled, jack-in-the-box energy, always looked like he might blow at any moment. But he’s become much subtler, and sexier, over the years. in the underappreciated 2013 comedy Fading Gigolo, which he also wrote and directed, he played a foxy florist who becomes a classy male escort, servicing sultry hotties (Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara) before falling for a lonely Hasidic widow (Vanessa Paradis). Suddenly, he was a leading man, and a hot one.

Turturro still has some of his old combustibility; you occasionally catch an air of menace behind that snaggle-tooth smile. But he now has more softness, more range, and the performance he gives in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is one of his finest, as well as one of the best of the year. In the first section of the film, you believe Harry is just a guy whose glory days have passed: He belongs to a dream New York, that of the 1970s and ‘80s, of strobe-lit dance clubs and independent cinemas seemingly on every block. (Cinematographer Sam Levy, who also shot Frances Ha and Lady Bird, is in tune with the old New York nestled within the current one; he captures the city, from the Bronx to Chinatown, in all its shabby-shiny glory.) At one point, Harry suggests to Rosie that the two hunker down for the evening and watch an old movie, maybe something with Barbara Stanwyck; he comes from a generation that was used to looking toward its past as well as its future.

The city wasn’t a safe place in Harry’s younger days—but we’re talking about something other than physical safety, a kind of creative vitality that, if you were attuned to it, could rub off on you like glitter. Harry still has some of that sparkle, but it’s tempered by melancholy, the aftermath of little mistakes and big ones he’s made along the way. Turturro captures all of it—and shows how Harry intends to do right by those he’s harmed—with the kind of lived-in ease you earn, if you’re lucky, over the course of a career. Whirling through the city in that tweed coat, he’s like Fred Astaire breezing through an obviously fake white-cardboard Venice or descending a staircase from nowhere. The grit of the city is his glamour, its noise his music. It’s all his for a song, or a watch deftly separated from its owner’s wrist. His city is a tough place and, as Odyssey sang, he should know the score by now. But at least he knows the dance steps, because as much as New York may change, those never do.

Tributes have poured in following the death of British actor Patrick Stewart, known for his decades of Shakespearean stage performances and his leading roles in the “Star Trek” and “X-Men” franchises.

Stewart, 86, died at his home in Los Angeles on Wednesday in the company of his wife, Sunny, after a “brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer's and dementia, according to a statement posted Stewart's official Instagram account announcing his death on Thursday. 

“His sonorous voice and singular talent will forever be synonymous with indelible performances in every genre,” the statement read. “He explored the human condition in all its poetic complexity and brought hope not only to the far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but into science fiction’s most iconic final frontier aboard the Starship Enterprise.”

Stewart's long and celebrated career spanned mediums and genres over more than six decades—from his first roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company to a variety of performances in television and film. He is set to make his final on-screen appearance in “Avengers: Doomsday,” which premiers in December, reprising his role as the X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier.

In an interview with TV Insider in June, Stewart said that he couldn’t “imagine ever officially ‘retiring.’”

“I’ll always and forever be an actor,” he said at the time.

Patrick Stewart’s career took him from Shakespeare to ‘Star Trek,’ and beyond 

Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in the West Yorkshire town of Mirfield in England’s coal-mining country, where he later recalled growing up in poverty and a home marked by domestic violence. He described acting as a “safe space” and a “refuge from real life” that he discovered after a teacher first introduced him to Shakespeare.

Years before he made his big-screen debut, Stewart trained in classical theater and took on his first professional roles on the British stage in the 1950s and 1960s. He joined the esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, going from smaller supporting roles to storied leading parts over the course of more than 15 years as a regular member of the company.

Beginning in the 1970s, Stewart appeared in television series including “Fall of Eagles” (1974), “I, Claudius” (1976), and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

He reached a new level of international stardom with his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” series, which he played from 1987 to1994. In 2000, Stewart took on another career-defining part, that of Professor Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” movies. 

Throughout his career, Stewart received various accolades, including two Laurence Olivier Awards, recognized as the highest honor in British theater, and a Grammy for his recording of “Peter and the Wolf,”; as well as garnering nominations for the Golden Globes, Emmys, and a Tony. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to drama in 2010. 

Outpourings of praise and remembrance 

The news of Stewart’s death quickly drew tributes from many within the “Star Trek” and Marvel worlds where he inhabited two of his most recognizable roles.

“We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today. And, in my book, a tremendous friend and man. I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days,” wrote the actor Hugh Jackman, who starred as Wolverine in the “X-Men” films alongside Stewart. 

Marvel Studios also paid tribute to Stewart on Thursday. 

“Sir Patrick brought Professor Charles Xavier to life with extraordinary grace, intelligence, and humanity, defining the character for generations of fans, from ‘X-Men’ to ‘Logan’ to ‘Avengers: Doomsday.’ He was a singular talent, a generous collaborator, and a true gentleman,” Marvel wrote in a statement shared on social media.

The studio's president, Kevin Feige, said in a statement to Variety that “after years of knowing him as the inimitable Captain Picard, I was in awe — and he turned out to be everything I had seen on screen and more: brilliant, charming, warm, generous, with a quiet strength and gravitas.”  

Feige added that “away from the cameras, he was even more remarkable, with a wonderfully sharp sense of humor.”

The “Star Trek” franchise remembered Stewart in a post on its official Instagram page as “a voice. A presence. A captain unlike any other.”

“Sir Patrick Stewart gave generations of fans an icon who inspired us to look toward the stars,” the post read. “Today, we celebrate an extraordinary life and an enduring legacy. Thank you, Sir Patrick.”

William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” franchise, said in a post on X that Stewart was “a friend, a colleague, and a magnificent actor. From the stage to the bridge of the Enterprise, he brought intelligence, grace, and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did. Captain Picard stood for the best of us, and so did the man who played him. I was filled with affection and admiration for him and his work.”

George Takei, who played Lt. Hikaru Sulu in the original “Star Trek” series, called Stewart on threads “a true and irreplaceable legend.” 

“He inspired a whole next generation of star-gazers who looked longingly ahead to a brighter future for all humanity,” Takei said.

Stewart’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” co-stars Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on the series, and Jonathan Scott Frakes, who played William Riker, also shared tributes to the late actor. 

“Godspeed, Captain,” Wheaton wrote in a message on Instagram, alongside a photo of himself with Stewart.

“Rest in peace, my friend,” Frakes wrote.

Rebecca Romijn, who like Stewart has played roles in both the “Star Trek” and “X-Men” franchises said in a video posted on social media: “I feel so grateful to have known him for the last 25 years, and to have been in his orbit … both as a fellow mutant and as a fellow member of Starfleet.”

“He was positively delicious, hilarious, naughty, incredible sense of humor, and that booming voice of his that always spoke to the very back of the room, as every classically trained Shakespearean great needs to master, has always been an inspiration,” she said. “I send my condolences to his family, and I’ll miss my friend dearly. Rest in peace, Patrick.”

Cary Elwes, who starred alongside Stewart in “Lady Jane” and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” recalled that he “first met Patrick on the set of Lady Jane back in 1984 and fell in love with him immediately.”

"Not only was amiable and kind with a great sense of humor, he was incredible to work with. His command of the screen with his sheer presence and that unmistakable voice was a sight to behold," Elwes wrote in a post on Instagram.