When you’re a kid, young men going off to war look like men. When you’re a grown-up, you see that they’re really just boys. If The Mosquito Bowl gets close to any essential truth, it’s that one. This is director Peter Berg’s retelling of a true story involving young football stars who went off to fight in the Pacific during World War II, focusing on four real-life figures: Dave Schreiner and Bob Bauman (played by Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgård) were teammates and close friends playing for the University of Wisconsin; Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) was a fullback for Purdue; and John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) had graduated from Brown University and been drafted into the NFL by the time the war had started. As Berg presents it, all four of these men went off believing they could win the war the same way you win a football game, with strategy and athleticism, only to learn how far off the mark they were. The film’s title refers to a legendary football game between two Marine regiments at Guadalcanal, on Christmas Eve, 1944. A few months later, three of the four would be dead in Okinawa: Of the 65 men who played in the Mosquito Bowl, 15 were killed on the island.

There’s a lot of drama inherent in that premise, and Berg—director of films like Hancock, The Kingdom, and Friday Night Lights, progenitor of the hit TV series—takes perhaps too much time drawing it out. He introduces the main characters with moderate efficiency: Schreiner is a solid, rather quiet guy who’s given to overthinking everything; as the film opens, his team has just lost to Purdue, and he’s still simmering with resentment toward Butkovich, who appears to be something of a hothead. Bauman is the solid Wisconsin country lad, giving his younger brother instructions on holding the family homestead together. And McLaughry is intelligent and grounded, if somewhat undersketched, though he does anchor the movie’s opening scene, which gives us some sense of what these young men left behind when they went to war, things they could never get back.

Read more: The Heartbreaking True Story of War and Football in The Mosquito Bowl

After some characteristically dehumanizing basic training, the men are hauled off to Tarawa. (In real life, the four weren’t in the same regiment, though it’s a forgivable dramatic tweak.) This occasions the movie’s first protracted battle sequence, in which these newly minted Marines get a swift education in what war is about. Legs are blown off. Pinwheeling men, having been set ablaze with flamethrowers, scream in agony. Blood burbles through gaping wounds. After we, and they, have made it through this ordeal, there’s a great deal of talking among the men about the grim circumstances they’ve found themselves in. Then there’s some football—the actual Mosquito Bowl—where they get to have some fun. This is the most exhilarating section of the film. It also feels like the shortest.

Because the deadly battle at Okinawa is yet to come, and Berg will spare us no bloody detail. (The script was adapted from the 2022 book of the same name by Buzz Bissinger, who also wrote the book that the 2004 film Friday Night Lights was based on.) More limbs are blasted off, more bullets end lives instantly or with agonizing slowness, more bayonets pierce tender flesh. War is hell, and Berg doesn’t want us to forget it.

In my early film-reviewing days, even before the existence of comments sections, I would sometimes get emails from veterans telling me what I had gotten wrong in writing about this or that war film. Most of those letters had a “Listen here, little lady” tone, but I didn’t mind them. The experience of watching a war movie is hardly the same as being in combat; it’s not supposed to be. Still, these guys had been to places I hadn’t. Even if they clearly didn’t understand my job, I’d have to admit to knowing next to nothing about theirs.

But from watching lots of war films—from the time I was a kid, when my World War II veteran dad would bring me along to see movies like the 1976 Midway, because no one else would go with him—I do know that when it comes to depicting the brutality of war, less is more. You can dramatize, or allude to, some truly horrific stuff—but choose your details wisely. One well-placed depiction of a combat atrocity can be enough to haunt a viewer forever. With The Mosquito Bowl, Berg throws so much violence at us that it comes to feel like padding, while the depiction of the Mosquito Bowl itself, the core of the movie, is pure joy. War doesn’t make a boy a man so much as it knocks the boyhood out of him, fast—which may be why it’s both freeing and poignant to watch these young men escaping, if only briefly, into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

Mount Everest is the largest mountain in the world. It’s estimated that more than 7,500 people have stood on its peak, reaching an astonishing 29,031 feet above sea level in Nepal, typically climbing up the mountain’s south side. But Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Everest: The Other Side shifts focus to the mountain’s north face. It is here that two people, ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, attempted to do something that no human being had done before. 

Morrison and Nelson met in 2015 on an expedition to Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, in the Mahalangur Himalayas. The pair developed a friendship before beginning a romantic relationship in 2017, bonding over their shared sense of adventure. “There’s a connection I don’t feel anywhere else…I love how it makes me feel alive,” Nelson says about ski mountaineering in the new film, which hit theaters on Oct. 30 following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Together, Morrison and Nelson conceived a plan: They would climb to the top of Everest’s north face, and once they’d reached the summit, become the first to ski down it. It was the ultimate proposal for a pair of adventurous thrill-seekers, but one wrong move could result in disaster. They never got the chance to take the risk together, though: Disaster struck before they embarked on the journey, a tragedy the directors capture in devastating detail in the new film.

Vasarhelyi and Chin are drawn to stories of people who accomplish extraordinary things, and they set out to capture them in a manner that fully captures their feats, like in Free Solo, Meru, and The Rescue. Everest: The Other Side is playing in both regular format and IMAX cinemas, the latter of which takes particular advantage of the breathtaking shots the filmmakers were able to capture, offering a sense of how epic Everest is, and how dangerous. 

Though most people don’t participate in extreme sports, Vasarhelyi believes there’s something inherently relatable about these feats. “I think it’s fundamental to the human paradox, which is this ability to dream audaciously, and then the mentality, psychology, mania—whatever you want to call it—to actually have the grit, determination, and diligence to get it done. I think everyone can identify with that,” she tells TIME.

A tragedy changes everything

Vasarhelyi and Chin intended for Everest: The Other Side to capture Morrison and Nelson’s historic feat. But on Sept. 26, 2022, tragedy struck. Nelson and Morrison were climbing nearby Mount Manaslu in Nepal when an avalanche swept down the slope, killing Nelson. It was a devastating moment captured on camera, one that had both the filmmakers and Morrison questioning whether they should continue with their journey, and the film, at all.
“We always knew we were making a film about Jim and Hilaree and their attempt to ski and climb the direct north face, but these films for us always had to have something deeper. The part that stayed true throughout was this extraordinary love story,” says Chin. 

Morrison had experienced tragic loss before. In 2011, he lost his wife Katie and their two children in a plane crash. “I knew about Jim’s history and the loss that he’d been through, and how he had moved through that loss and found the strength and courage to fall in love again with Hilaree. That was extremely moving to me,” says Chin. “When we lost Hilaree, we saw that again in real time. We were living it with him.”

Together, they decided that Chin, a longtime friend of the couple and an experienced climber, would step in as Morrison’s climbing partner, replacing Nelson. 

“Jimmy and I fundamentally see this differently," says Vasarhelyi of whether they would continue making the film. “It was such a tragedy when Hilaree passed, and real life has to be lived in that moment. With the decision of Jimmy stepping in as Jim’s only climbing partner, my professional interest came into direct conflict with my personal responsibilities.” At the time of filming, Vasarhelyi and Chin were married with two children. The couple divorced in 2025. 

“The question was, ‘Do you want to make that film?’ It was going to be heavier. It had to be very candid, which all our films are, but this was requiring us to go one step further in this investigation. There was also the reality of, how do you wrangle the story that was conceived one way into something that could both honor her legacy as well as honor this incredible journey that Jim would go on?” says Vasarhelyi.

Ultimately, it was Morrison who made the decision to continue filming. “In the beginning, I didn’t want to keep going to the mountains. I was devastated by the loss of Hilaree,” he says. Initially, it looked like the quest to ski mountaineer the north face of Everest was over, and there was a seven-month break in filming. “Over time,” Morrison explains, “the inner fire and the passion for this project Hilaree and I shared together became a driving force in my life. I began to call [Chai and Jimmy] to say, ‘I’m going to go back into the mountains. I’m going to go on another expedition and push myself to complete this goal for us and for her legacy and her story.” 

With Chin as his climbing partner and Vasarhelyi and Chin continuing to document the adventure, Everest: The Other Side would go on. Instead of a story of a couple facing this incredible physical feat together, it became a story of processing grief and overcoming tragedy. 

The two expeditions

The expedition on Everest’s north face occurred in 2024. Chin explains why the north side of Everest, the more challenging route up the mountain and an extremely steep, 9,000-ft. face, holds such appeal. “In terms of pure technical difficulty, it’s really challenging. Because of those challenges and because it’s a direct line, it’s really appealing to climbers.” He continues: “When you’ve spent a lifetime in the mountains, you build experience to take on more and more difficult climbs, and as a ski mountaineer, more challenging ski descents. This is the ultimate line on the tallest mountain on Earth that literally splits the biggest face on Everest.”

The 2024 expedition involved dozens of people, including climbers, camp managers, cooks, and cinematographers. The set-up involved three different camps. The climb would start at 20,000 ft. and go up 9,000 ft. to the top of the mountain. An advanced basecamp would be established at 18,100 ft., as well as three additional camps, with one right below the entrance of the Hornbein Couloir, the most challenging and steepest part of the climb.

To accomplish such a challenging climb, the climbers would do rotations, going up the mountain and back down, in an effort to build up red blood cells and acclimatize themselves to the changes in altitude as well as to bring equipment up the mountain. The process involves pushing the body to its limits, over and over again, before returning to base camp and going again. “It’s hard to sleep at 18,000 ft., so it becomes this game of acclimatizing and getting all your equipment, the rope and all the oxygen cylinders and the sherpa up the mountain,” says Morrison. 

Unfortunately, one of the climbers on the expedition, Yukta Gurung, broke his leg on the journey up Everest. With that injury and the uneasy weather conditions, the decision was made to call the expedition off. “It felt like we were walking away, and we weren’t coming back,” recalls Morrisson. Chin didn’t see it that way. “Walking through the airport terminal with Jimmy, he was like, ‘Of course you’re going to go back.’”
Chin was right. In September 2025, Morrison, Chin, and a team of 12 climbers, including a healed Gurung, returned to Everest. The expedition took seven weeks, and this time there were no injuries or unforeseen weather circumstances. On Oct. 15, 2025, they arrived at the peak. Jim Morrison, Jimmy Chin, and their team of climbers—Carla Perez, Esteban Mena Yanez, Pasang Sona Sherpa, Pemba Sherpa, Roberto Morales, Erich Reopke, Nigma Tenjing Sherpa, Pemba Gelje Sherpa, Pur Bahadur “Yukta” Gurung, and Tenging Gyaljen Sherpa—reached the summit. It wasn’t over yet: Morrison still intended to be the first person to ski down Everest’s north face.

“We got to the summit about 2 p.m.,” recalls Morrison. “We spent about 45 minutes on top. I connected with Hilaree and spread some of her ashes. There were a lot of hugs and a lot of tears. Then I started transitioning to skiing, which might take five to 10 minutes normally, but takes a lot longer on top of a mountain. Just buckling your boots at 29,000 ft. Every couple of buckles, you have to stand up and take a break to get hold of your breath. Everything becomes laborious. Then I looked over at Jimmy and my other teammates on the summit and said ‘OK, here we go.’” Any mistake, Morrison reminded his teammates, and himself, could prove catastrophic.

The epic descent

Then came what Morrison describes as “the greatest run of my life—the hardest, longest, deepest, scariest, most dramatic ski run.” It took four hours and five minutes to ski down the north face of Everest. “It wasn’t four hours straight skiing,” says Morrison. “You take it one step at a time, one turn at a time, and there’s a lot of stopping.” He compares it to running to the end of the street as fast as you can, over and over. Going down at least means more access to oxygen. “As I went further down the mountain, I was able to recover a lot quicker, and as my physical endurance wore away, I got into a more oxygen-rich environment, which helped keep me going and able to achieve this.”

Morrison explains his feelings as he reached safety as “a tidal wave of emotions.” He recalls: “I just totally broke down. I’m crying and yelling at the sky. I’m all by myself in this glacier, and it was just a tremendous overwhelming feeling that we did it,” referring to himself and Hilaree. “I felt like we did it together, and we accomplished it. It starts with Hilaree and I, but it reverberates to the other 11 people that were on the summit with me, everyone that’s below me in base camp or in camp one,  and everyone across the planet pushing their energy for us to accomplish and achieve it.”

He looks back on the scale and scope of what they all accomplished together. “I felt like it was a tremendous team effort and something that humanity helped me do.”

In Netflix’s latest Korean drama series, Dead-End Job, the economy is literally trying to kill people. Lee Jae-wook (Alchemy of Souls) stars as Byeon Hyeok-jun, a jobless 30-year-old living in contemporary Seoul in this Squid Game-esque fantasy horror. Buried in debt from a landlord scam and subsequent stock-chasing, Hyeok-jun is actively considering dying by suicide. But when a mysterious company called Spider Staffing Agency starts offering him part-time gigs at 50, 100, or even 200 times the minimum wage, he is desperate enough to take them—even when it becomes clear that these jobs are supernaturally deadly. 

The series has an anthology-like feel, as Hyeok-jun takes on a new, terrifying part-time job more or less in each episode. Over the course of the eight-episode series, Hyeok-jun’s interest in Spider Staffing Agency’s jobs turns from financial to familial when he realizes that his father, who disappeared 20 years prior after falling into massive debt, was also used the temp agency. With the help of his younger sister, Ji-yoon (Typhoon Family’s Kim Min-ha), and Yeon-joo (Tastefully Yours’ Go Min-si), a mysterious woman investigating the agency, he commits to discovering Spider Staffing’s supernatural secrets.

What is Spider Staffing Agency?

By the end of Dead-End Job’s first season, many questions remain about the true purpose of Spider Staffing Agency. When Hyeok-jun first encounters the organization, it is managed by Mr. S. (Badland Hunters’ Lee Hee-joon), a charismatic middle man who sends part-timers to their probable death without so much as a heads up. 

When pressed by Hyeok-jun, Mr. S explains that these worksites exist where the border between the world of humans and the world of supernatural beings is at its thinnest. While humans live in the yang, explains Mr. S., these other beings stay in the yin. People like Hyeok-jun, who are desperate to make a living, emit especially strong yang energy when engaged in acts of paid labor. 

Spider Staffing sends workers to these border sites as sacrificial lambs to maintain the division between the two worlds. Surprisingly, Hyeok-jun has a knack for this work—while he may not always get the job done, he survives. But in the process, he watches many of his co-workers die.

Yeon-joo’s secret agenda

At first, Yeon-joo presents herself as an investigator trying to determine if Spider Staffing is facilitating unsafe labor practices. However, we find out in the series’ penultimate episode that Yeon-joo herself is a monster, tied to the other world. She wasn’t born a monster; she was once a young woman trying to make a living as a factory girl in a rapidly modernizing South Korea, roughly 40 years prior to the main events of the series. When Yeon-joo and her co-workers protested against their cruel labor conditions, they were met with violence. Yeon-joo was stuffed in a locker by her older co-worker to avoid the violence, not realizing that it was a doorway to the other world. When Yeon-joo comes out of the locker, it is modern-day Korea, and there is an amusement park where her factory once stood. It’s unclear at what point Yeon-joo turned from human to monster.

The real history related to Go Min-si’s character

Yeon-joo’s backstory ties into the real history of feminist labor organizing in South Korea. In 1970, activist Jeon Tae-il died by self-immolation to protest the treatment of women garment workers, who regularly dealt with sexual harassment, low wages, poor working conditions, and police brutality. The act sparked increased union activity, including the formation of the Garment Makers Union. In 1979, women of the YH Union organized a sit-in at the Seoul headquarters of the New Democratic Party in protest of the closure of the YH Company’s wig factory. Union member Kim Kyoung-sook was killed in the brutal police eviction, provoking widespread public opposition to President Park Chung-hee’s regime. 

Yeon-joo is not a specific historic character, but rather a symbol of this period in Korean history and of the role female factory workers and union organizers played in the rapid, painful transformation of the country’s economy and society in the second half of the 20th century.

Hyeok-jun finds his dad, and starts the apocalypse

Hyeok-jun promises his sister that he will not return to Spider Staffing, but he is lured back by Yeon-joo, who tells him she knows how to find his long-lost father. She shows Hyeok-joon the door inside of NeoCity Amusement Park that she came through from the other world, and tells Hyeok-jun that he can find his father through that door. He just has to make it through a shift at the deadly amusement park first.

When Ji-yoon realizes what her brother has done, she confronts Mr. S. about sending Hyeok-jun back on a job. Mr. S. insists that it is not his fault, but rather a direct result of the machinations of Yeon-joo, who is using Hyeok-jun as a pawn to open the door between worlds. When he does so, monsters from the other world will storm into our world, bringing about the apocalypse. From Yeon-joo’s perspective, it is what our world deserves after the way it has treated its most vulnerable workers. It will fully reveal the truth of the bones and blood our cities are built from. 

In the end, Hyeok-jun decides to open the door, even after Mr. S. warns him not to. While Hyeok-jun doesn’t understand the magnitude of his decision, he knows that he does not trust Mr. S., who gleefully sends desperate people to their deaths by labor. He watches Mr. S. shoot Yeon-joo several times, and sees no sense in his violence. The unleashed storm of dark energy pulls Yeon-joo and Mr. S. into its void, and tries to take Hyeok-jun too. While it has him in its clutches, he is able to see and talk to his father. A shell of the man he once was, clutching to a meager portion of money he hopes to give to his family, Hyeok-jun’s dad has been claimed by the other side. It is a warning of what Hyeok-jun could become if he allows an obsession with work and debt to take over his life.

Before the darkness can fully claim Hyeok-jun, Ji-yoon pulls her brother from the door’s threshold. Together, they close the door before more of the other world’s entities can escape into ours, stopping—or at least halting—the apocalypse.

Dead-End Job’s ending explained

Following the events of the season, Hyeok-jun is in a much better place than where he started, but his life is far from perfect. He has been able to pay off his debt using the money he earned from Spider Staffing, but he is back to the part-time worker grind. Still, he appreciates the small moments with his mother and sister, and seemingly values his life in a way he did not before. The world is unchanged in its cruelties. When Hyeok-jun meets a woman ready to die by suicide on the same bridge he started the season on, he stops her but cannot give her a good reason why she should live, past that he was like her once. Still, she decides to put her shoes back on and continue living.

In a twist ending, Hyeok-jun gets a text from Spider Staffing and returns to the abandoned office. Once there, he is offered a new job: as Mr. S’s replacement. In a voice message pre-recorded by Mr. S., the manager wonders if Hyeok-jun will make different decisions and come to different conclusions than he did in the role. In Mr. S.’s eyes, the deaths of some people were acceptable for the survival of everyone else.

Reports on the news of unexplained fires and otherworldly remains imply that there may be long-term consequences to Hyeok-jun opening that door. In the series’ final moments, Hyeok-jun opens his mouth to either accept the job or reject it, but the credits roll before we can hear his answer.

In a mid-credits scene, Ji-yoon receives a text about the successful results of a work recruitment from Kyung-il Group. The mysterious company owned both Yeon-joo’s factory, and the amusement park. Could they also be behind Spider Staffing? Either way, both brother and sister are getting pulled back into the ongoing supernatural battle.

Will Dead-End Job have a second season?

Dead-End Job leaves the door open for a second season. Its greenlighting is no doubt dependent on how the first season performs on Netflix. If a second season is greenlit, it will be awhile before it can be filmed, given that main actor Lee Jae-wook is currently performing mandatory military service. He is expected to be discharged in November 2027.

“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.

The night before an airline lost my wheelchair was among the most dazzling of my life. I sat at a long table in the back of an L.A. movie theater as talented writers, actors, and creatives read aloud the draft of a movie script I’d co-written with Oscar-winning filmmaker Siân Heder. I felt the thrill of people laughing at just the right moments. I clocked cheeks shiny with tears. But more than anything, I marveled over the possibility that this movie might actually get made. When I was a newly paralyzed kid in the ’90s, with freshly fitted leg braces, I watched Forrest Gump overcome his disability by running so hard his own braces literally fell off. Months after I started college, I watched a recently disabled boxer ask her coach to end her life in Million Dollar Baby. In my formative years, the stories of disability I saw were scarce, unrecognizable, and often harmful.

Our script, Being Heumann, tells the real-life David and Goliath story of a standoff between the U.S. government and a group of scrappy disabled protesters that changed the course of American history. The fight revolved around Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a tiny bit of legislation that reframed how we think about disability in our communities. Instead of positioning its embodiment as a personal tragedy that inevitably excludes people from society, the language of 504 suggested that our exclusion had been largely created and should be corrected. The law passed in 1973, but after years without any moves to implement it, Judy Heumann led over 100 disabled people and nondisabled allies in a sit-in at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco. They lived in those halls for almost a month as the government tried to push them out, cutting off their water supply and phone lines. When it became clear that they weren’t going to buckle, the government relented, agreeing to implement 504. The very group that had been deemed expendable took on the most powerful and won. It still holds the place as the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history.

Section 504 paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the first civil rights law for disabled people in the world. Thanks in large part to disabled WW II vet and my Kansas Senator, Bob Dole, it passed in 1990 with nearly unanimous bipartisan support and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush when I was 4 years old. Even if they’re not consistently or completely fulfilled, these laws changed our world in their insistence that physical and mental impairment alone should not and would not preclude us from participating in our communities—going to school; voting; receiving care in a hospital; being considered for a job for which we’re qualified; and accessing our libraries, post offices, public transit, housing, and more. In other words, Section 504 and the ADA protect every American citizen; if there is one thread that binds us together, it is that every single one of us will acquire a disability if we live long enough. Still, I, like most Americans, never heard a whisper of this history growing up.

It wasn’t until I worked on this script that my perspective considerably expanded. It was like putting on a pair of night-vision goggles: the curb cuts, accessible bathroom stalls, and ramps radiated a new story. Someone had fought for me to be here. It didn’t wipe out the inaccessibility and stigma that still exist in my life, but it enriched my understanding of the bigger story I was living inside. 

When I first joined the Being Heumann project, I was nervous about earning Judy’s trust. I remember sitting in my car, phone pressed against my sweaty ear, as she asked me questions about my life. “So you went to school with your siblings?” My attendance at the school down the street from my house was never a question, while Judy’s mother battled for years to get her daughter a spot in even a basement classroom. “And what was it like for you applying for teaching positions?” My wheelchair was never mentioned in job interviews, while Judy was denied a teaching license because her wheelchair was deemed a fire hazard. Recapping my life to The Judy Heumann, I saw more clearly than ever before how she and other activists had shaped it. Even as I’d sat on the edges of inaccessible playgrounds or been pushed out of unsustainable work cultures, the full life I live today would not exist if someone hadn’t fought hard for my inclusion before I was born. I wanted Judy to know that my outrage over the exclusion disabled people still face didn’t diminish my appreciation for the gifts she had granted us. I think I convinced her I could hold both stories as true.

While it didn’t make the final cut, one of the scenes performed at our table read told the story of the time Judy was forcibly removed from a plane when the airline insisted she needed a care attendant or a note from a doctor to fly. Someone expressed appreciation that airlines are now more accommodating to wheelchair travelers. Siân looked at me knowingly. “Well, they’re still not great,” she said.

And so when I flew home from the reading, I can’t say I was surprised to find upon landing that my wheelchair, which cost more than my car and is fully customized to prevent pain and pressure sores, was missing. In its absence, I was placed in an airport wheelchair—although, given that it was not self-propelling, it feels more apt to call it a cart. Because airplanes don’t have accessible bathrooms, I hadn’t peed in eight hours, but without wheels that I could push myself, I couldn’t get to a toilet without help. I almost always fly alone, but out of sheer luck, my husband had accompanied me on this trip. We watched the people from the last flights pour out the doors until the floor was empty. Over an hour later, the airline informed us they had no idea where the wheelchair was. I felt like I was being sent home with body parts missing.

The next day, as I sat at my kitchen table, calling the same customer-service numbers again and again, a -familiar feeling thumped in my chest. While we worked on the script, I wanted to capture the frantic helplessness that can come when your basic rights are not in your control. You can hold up a protest sign, put your body on the line, hurl your voice to the sky, write yet another email to legislators, and still, it often feels like you are entirely at the mercy of a few people at the top who aren’t even listening.

Two days later, my husband found the frame of my wheelchair dropped off on our doorstep, scratches across the front, two parts dangling. They never found the wheels. A replacement pair arrived three weeks later. 

While I recounted the ordeal to Siân, we marveled at the irony. Here we were, telling the story of a woman who took on the airlines for disabled passengers to have equal access to travel, and 50 years later disabled travelers still take the very real risk of our lives being upended every time we fly. We have come so far. We have so far to go. I saw the dichotomy everywhere. It was my generation’s job, I thought, to build on the progress Judy’s had fought for. What I didn’t realize at the time, however, is that we wouldn’t just be advancing it—we’d be defending it as well.

Almost a year to the date of that hopeful, disastrous flight home, I found out that Apple Studios had greenlighted the making of Being Heumann. I texted Siân gleeful curse words in disbelief. In the coming months, I saw a big film studio prioritize authentic disability casting for more roles than I could count on my hands and ask good questions about how to make the filming process accessible for them. I think I stopped breathing while I watched Ruth Madeley channel Judy’s chutzpah on her audition tape. Every time I thought of my younger self getting the chance to watch this story with these characters, my eyes welled. There is no way to quantify what it would have meant to see bodies like mine do something as ordinary as get dressed, go to work, or receive care, let alone hook up, party, fight, cry and win together. To see the world reflected back to me as I experienced it—pushed out by stairs and curbs, racing wheelchairs down hallways, sitting eye level with butts.

It was right in the middle of this dreamy bubble that I first learned about a new lawsuit, Texas v. Becerra, filed by the attorneys general in 17 states, seeking to make Section 504 unconstitutional or dismantle all of the detailed protections that it lays out. I scoured the internet for any reporting from mainstream news outlets. The silence stunned me. I went directly to the lawsuit itself, and as I squinted into the legalese, I recognized arguments that sounded identical to the ones posed in the 1970s. We’d written these sentiments into the mouths of our most skeptical characters: disabled people are a burden on the rest of us; we shouldn’t be forced to integrate them into our communities. 

Over the course of two years, the lawsuit evolved; it was updated as Texas v. Kennedy, the people made noise, and many states dropped out. Then in June, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo asserting that Section 504 and the ADA don’t actually mandate that states support disabled people to remain integrated in their communities. Instead, this memo claims, sending people to live in institutions—away from their families, friends, and beds—is an acceptable option. This position is in direct conflict with the way disability-rights law has been interpreted by courts for decades. And, in addition to the human cost, it doesn’t make fiscal sense. For example, according to the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services and the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, sending one person with an intellectual or developmental disability (I/DD) to live in an institution can easily cost well over $310,000 a year. Providing home- and community-based services with an I/DD waiver for this same person would cost, on average, $70,000 a year. The discrepancy is similarly steep for someone with a physical disability. So at least in this case, it costs less to include us. 

Even so, that memo set the foundation for a joint proposal from the Department of Justice and the five remaining states that ultimately ended the case. They asked the court to vacate critical language about integration, and in September the judge agreed. Now the law remains on the books—only Congress can change the legislation itself—but it’s been utterly gutted, despite the loud outcry from disability advocates across the country and the way it had been applied since the protesters won their fight in 1977. It’s hard not to interpret this move as anything other than a profound disregard for the value of disabled life.

And yet, even as the lawsuit and memo wound their way through the government, the Toronto International Film Festival welcomed Being Heumann as its opening-night film. I rolled across the red carpet in my black sequined dress and scratched-up wheelchair frame, taking in the wide expanse of our embodied disabilities, each of us glammed out and feted for our talents. It felt like living inside two timelines: one where my government undercuts the foundations of laws that have long protected all of us, the other where the hubs of culture celebrate the incredible story behind the passing of those same laws. As Judy’s life’s work is threatened, audiences around the world are learning her name. The past is asserting itself into the present, the future is teetering toward the past, all inside one surreal moment. I’m trying to hold onto the contradiction, never allowing the significance of one reality to eclipse the other. 

I wish Judy were here to give us our marching orders—to make the monster lurking around the corner feel a little smaller with the force of her voice. I wish she could take in the wild power of her own story moving across a screen and witness this outpouring of recognition, gratitude, and celebration. She died unexpectedly while we were working on the film. In fact, many of the 504 leaders have passed away—Brad Lomax, Ed Roberts, Kitty Cone, Ron Washington, Hale Zukas. Their generation came of age in a world where doctors routinely told parents they should send their disabled children away to live out their lives in institutions, but their activism fundamentally changed the lives of all of us coming up behind them. Now that we are the adults in the room, what legacy will we leave behind?

I find myself thinking a lot about the work culture can do where legislation drops off. As we continue to fight for the laws Judy and her peers helped make real, I wonder about the ripples of an entertaining movie that isn’t here to force a lesson but bring to life a vivid story of disability as a dynamic, nuanced, deeply human experience. I wonder if one film might beget more. Perhaps this kind of authentic representation of disabled life could be a fixture that younger generations will one day take for granted. Maybe storytelling can insist on our shared humanity in the ways legislation can’t.

Because, even as I see now more than ever how essential laws can be, I don’t want just laws; I also want a society that values disabled people enough to implement them meaningfully and fully. I want whole communities invested in the great, ongoing project of building a world for all of us. I think Judy would co-sign my enormous appetite. I no longer believe human evolution inevitably bends toward including more of us, but if she taught us anything, it’s that we don’t show up because the outcome is guaranteed; we show up because it isn’t. 

Nocturne is everything you would expect from a 21st century prestige crime drama. Adapted from a series of best-selling Scandinavian mystery novels, the Apple TV thriller, premiering with two episodes on Oct. 30, casts a genuine movie star (Liev Schreiber) as a brilliant yet broken detective immersed in a case that has become an all-consuming obsession. The large ensemble represents multiple law-enforcement agencies, victims, bystanders, and a singular alleged serial killer played by an actor on a hot streak (Stephen Graham). Children’s lives are at stake. A risky undercover operation is undertaken. Relationships simmer, until suddenly they’re at a full boil. Collateral damage piles up. Progress is glacial, with essential bits of backstory meted out in stingy flashbacks. Underlying every scene is an atmosphere heavy with dread, as though this sordid scenario has arisen not merely from the brain of one twisted villain, but out of a rot at the heart of society.

It’s a prototypical slow burn. This format, in which one complex investigation spans a season or more, wasn’t new to American TV when AMC’s Nordic noir adaptation The Killing became a sensation in 2011. (In this respect and many others, Twin Peaks, for one, was ahead of its time.) But the convergence of streaming, an ideal venue for binge-friendly serialized storytelling, and an audience for ambitious television that had been growing for more than a decade facilitated its proliferation as a cinematic alternative to the formulaic procedurals that still predominate on broadcast networks. The most acclaimed and discussed mystery shows of the past 15 years—True Detective, Mare of Easttown, Fargo, even Only Murders in the Building—have been, with few exceptions, slow burns. Yet, as Nocturne’s mixed success suggests, the tropes and limitations of the style become more apparent with each new title.

In one welcome deviation from the norm, whodunit seems clear from the beginning. Confined in the bowels of a Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital, the serial killer Jurek Walter (Graham) calmly coaxes an inmate in the adjacent solitary cell into suicide. When a boy thought to be one of his victims, Michael (Landon Valentin), turns up, filthy and feeble but alive, years after he and his sister went missing, a new hunt for the girl begins. Schreiber’s Jonah Lynn, a Philly cop and military veteran who is now retired and a bit reclusive, was instrumental in the original investigation. Michael’s return draws him back in, along with an FBI agent, Saga (Zazie Beetz), who is a surrogate daughter to Jonah. As Quinn, a rigorous colleague from the bureau (Poorna Jagannathan), and the weary local police chief (Bill Camp) lead the search, Saga goes undercover as a patient at the hospital and Jonah goes rogue, to the surprise of no one who has ever worked with him. They don’t just want to find the sister; they want to catch Jurek masterminding violent crimes from his cell, thereby proving he’s coherent enough to rot in a real prison.

A slow burn can only be as compelling as the personalities and ideas its pace affords it time to explore. Creator Rowan Joffé and his cast, adapting the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler (a pen name of Swedish husband-andwife team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril), do craft a few fascinating characters. Beetz’s Saga is a spookily canny mix of actor, detective, and daredevil, inhabiting her cutesy-until-she’s-not patient persona so fully, you might start to doubt she’s fully faking it. Graham weaponizes the soft masculinity that he wielded so movingly as the horrified father of a homicidal teen incel in Adolescence. It’s his cunning performances of compassion that set Jurek apart from the typical thriller psycho and make us believe he has the capacity to pull off logistically inconceivable feats of cruelty. Rory Culkin adds tension as Karl, a sensitive hospital worker whose anger at the way superiors use him as a pawn leaves him vulnerable to Jurek’s manipulation.

What happens outside the institution isn’t nearly as gripping. Strong actors like Camp, Jagannathan, and Chrissy Metz, who plays Michael’s mother Ida, are saddled with underwritten characters. Everything we know about Jonah—that he’s brooding, single-minded, and willing to break rules in pursuit of justice—is a cliché of the genre, as is his odd-couple partnership with the stiff but well-intentioned Quinn. I got the sense, around the season’s midpoint (seven out of 10 episodes were provided for review), that Joffé was holding some of these characters at arm’s length in order to shock us with revelations about them later. But the extended delay in supplying basic context about Jonah, in particular, comes off as too much of a contrivance. It also distances us from the show’s implicit questions about whether laws and protocols enable (or prevent) justice, and how people like Jonah and Saga should weigh the rewards of dangerous, personal missions against the threat of harm these crusades pose.

Nocturne’s small-town Pennsylvania setting is guaranteed to earn it comparisons to Mare of Easttown and its spiritual sequel, Task. Beyond the dutifully adopted (and, to my ears, pretty accurate) accents, though, it lacks the specificity of those shows, both created by area native Brad Ingelsby, with regard to the region and its people. It doesn’t have the same curiosity about or patience in depicting the characters’ lives outside the Jurek case, either. Viewers got invested in Kate Winslet’s Mare because we got to watch her try to keep up with her precocious teenage daughter and endure the harsh words of her judgmental mom. (It didn’t hurt that said mom was played by Jean Smart.) As Robbie in Task, Tom Pelphrey had space to show us a criminal who was also a lonely, newly single father desperate to provide for his beloved children.

As any connoisseur of the hundreds of crime serials TV has produced since The Killing can tell you, there are only so many murder plots. But there are as many unique characters as there are human beings on planet earth. A slow burn that doesn’t make use of such a rich source of fuel is apt to fizzle out.

When it comes to representing the famous and addicted, Hollywood seems to know only two stories. Both begin with a passionate talent who longs to make an impact on the world. Then, as no less an expert on this subject than Courtney Love memorably put it, they get what they want and they never want it again. Afflicted by affluenza or impostor syndrome or the newfound knowledge that success can’t heal their internal wounds, they escape into substance abuse. It’s only in their final chapters that the two narratives diverge. Some lucky souls hit rock bottom, get clean, and live happily ever after. The rest die young.

It would be easy to slot Matthew Perry, the Friends star who died from ketamine and drowning in October 2023, into the latter category. But in the intimate three-part Netflix documentary The One About Matthew Perry, director Mary Robertson (Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV) honors his memory by resisting that simplistic binary. Yes, addiction (and a cadre of enablers who are now serving time for their roles in his death) killed Perry at 54. It’s also true that he spent more than 25 years surviving it, fighting to act and write and enjoy his friendships and make his family proud and fall in love. Instead of hiding that struggle, he used his fortune to aid others in their recoveries and his platform to advocate for a broader understanding of addiction as the illness that it is.

Robertson captures all of this in straightforward, chronological order, through emotional interviews with family and longtime friends, as well as Perry’s own startlingly frank reflections in media appearances and his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The absence of major celebrities, whether by design or otherwise, limits the fond platitudes. In their place are vivid behind-the-scenes anecdotes and candid memories of who he was offscreen—the ambition, charm, humor, and magnanimity, but also the pain he was capable of inflicting on those who loved and needed him. His sister Mia Perry Bowick, a psychotherapist, is the most insightful presence, embracing grief and ambivalence as she ties her big brother’s highs and lows to early family dynamics.

With all due respect to Chandler Bing, Perry’s greatest contribution was his vulnerability, even when the image of him it exposed wasn’t flattering. In its honesty, this documentary continues that work.

Correction, Oct. 27

The original version of this story misstated the last name of the series' director. She is Mary Robertson, not Mary Robinson.