“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.

The title of Pawel Pawlikowski’s extraordinary, compact drama Fatherland has a double meaning. In this somewhat fictionalized story of Thomas Mann’s brief 1949 visit to Germany, the Nobel Prize-winning author, after having lived in exile in California for 16 years, is challenged with finding his mooring in a country he can no longer call home; if it’s his fatherland, it long ago turned its back on him and his ideals. But fatherland can also be a state of mind where fathers live, a state both more specific and more elusive than fatherhood. In Pawlikowski’s telling of this portion of Mann’s story, it’s during this trip that Mann learns of the death of his son, Klaus—also a writer, though not as successful as his father—by suicide. If the elder Mann feels any emotion when he hears this news, it’s frozen inside him, a bubble of feeling isolated on its own ice floe. Fatherland, so secure in its rigid borders, is a cold, cold place.

Mann’s freedom from this interior island prison happens in the film’s last five minutes, a wordless reckoning that’s as quietly moving as anything you’ll see at the movies this year. But that moment wouldn’t hold so much power if Pawlikowski—with the help of his cowriter, Hendrik Handloegten—weren’t so skilled at sketching in the feathery details leading up to it. Pawlikowski is also the director of the 2013 Ida, as well 2018’s Cold War, pictures that, like this one, deftly balance postwar Eastern Bloc realities with the truth that all humans strive for connection and belonging. These aren’t dour movies, but serious, lustrous ones, less “political” pictures than movies about people trying to sort out what living really means.

At the beginning of Fatherland, no one—not even the aged Mann, played here in a quietly extraordinary performance by Hanns Zischler—has figured that out. The movie opens with a long-distance phone call: Mann’s semi-estranged son Klaus (August Diehl), living in Cannes and clearly in emotional distress, has reached out to his sister Erika—we’ll later realize it’s Sandra Hüller’s voice we hear on the other end of the line. Erika, an actress, writer, and onetime race-car driver, has become her father’s assistant, and she now urges Klaus to join her and their father on the trip they’re about to undertake, from California to the “new” barely postwar Germany. In the year of Goethe’s 200^th birthday, Mann will be accepting two awards, one in Frankfurt, in the West, the other in the East, in Weimar: his justification is that his literary idol was born in one city and died in the other, though it’s obvious that Goethe couldn’t have imagined that chasm that would open between the two within 200 years' time.

Both cities are in transition, and in crisis, though neither wants to admit as much. In Frankfurt, a gray city crumbling at the corners and still finding its footing after the war, though somehow doing its best to pretend all is well, Mann and Erika are greeted by the mayor and hustled off to a press conference. There, the esteemed man himself answers the respectful but probing questions of journalists. Once they learn that he’ll also be traveling to the East, it’s not lost on them that doing so could make him a target at home in the States, where anti-Communist storm clouds have long been gathering. And there are other, more spiritual questions for him to consider. An American journalist, a woman who, it turns out, is an old friend of Erika’s and possibly a former lover (she’s played by Anna Madeley), asks him where he feels his true home is, now that he’s an American citizen. His answer is courtly but honest. He may live in the United States, he says, “but where my Heimat is, my home, is a much more difficult question.” He’s a man between states, both literally and figuratively.

In Weimar, the chief way to welcome a returning hero is apparently to greet him with a somber folk song sung by a choir dressed in dark clothing; at one point, he’s serenaded by a group of children singing the then-newly pened East German national anthem. Mann accepts it all gracefully, but there’s also something a bit quizzical and lost in his expression. He’s jarred by one alarming moment: a wild-eyed man appears at the hotel suite where he and Erika are staying, begging him to reveal in his speech that the nearby former concentration camp Buchenwald is now being used as a detention center for political prisoners. The man is whisked way by officials before he can finish his spiel, though it’s doubtful any of it has swayed Mann at all. In both the East and West, when it’s time to address the audiences who have eagerly gathered to hear his thoughts, he gives heartfelt speeches, anchored in the legacy of Goethe, about the power of art to transform and sustain not just individuals, but whole nations. He seems to truly believe, as he says at one point, that art doesn’t recognize borders—or at least, he truly wants to believe it.

Through all of this, Hüller’s Erika serves her father dutifully. When necessary, she translates his responses to journalists into fluid French; she attends cocktail parties in his honor, even when it means suffering the indignity of running into an oily, traitorous, Nazi-loving ex-husband she’d rather forget forever; she drives her father through the countryside, and though we can’t see her face as she does so, we wonder if this particular task gives her some joy, given her car-racing past. But through it all, because Hüller is such a subtly expressive actor, almost gossamer in the ways she shifts moods, we see the ways in which her resentments toward her father can’t help simmering to the surface. When she learns of her beloved brother’s death, her composure doesn’t crumple visibly—only somehow we know her emotional reserves are folding in and flattening like a house of cards. And when she sees how little this event seems to trouble her father, she can barely go through the motions of helping him on his mission, which, as he seems to envision it, is to save his homeland with his lofty views on art.

How these two find their way back to one another, and to a place of acknowledged and shared grief, is a kind of unspoken miracle that unfolds in last 15 minutes or so of this elegant, remarkably economical movie. Artistically and emotionally, Fatherland accomplishes more in its 82-minute runtime than any two-hour-plus movie released this year. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Ida and Cold War, renders Fatherland in the same satiny black and white, as well as the same serenely squarish, or Academy, aspect ratio. Every frame is spare, elegant, intimate, and the film moves along so gracefully that you’re barely prepared for how exhilarating, and how quietly devastating, its final moment is. At one point, Hüller’s Erika tells her father that Klaus had once said he felt Bach made him feel life was worth living. Her father shrugs that information off, but the final moments of Fatherland—incorporating a serendipitous conjuring, like a specter, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—bring it back to him. Can a person have more than one Heimat? Or can that place of spiritual belonging shift over time? Perhaps Bach had the answer. Perhaps he put it in a piece of music, for us to find when we most need it, in a church or even in a movie.

From the Palme d’Or-winning abortion drama 4 Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (2007), to the institutional corruption-themed Graduation (2016) and beyond, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s body of work has always concerned itself with the human cost of systemic oppression and bureaucratic faultlines. With the searing legal and familial drama Fjord, which earned Mungiu his second Palme at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in May, the filmmaker once again brings his signature sense of slow-burning tension to the clash between individual and societal codes of morality. Except this time, he shrewdly flips the script. With the story of a religious immigrant family of seven facing an uphill battle against Norway’s child protection services (known as Barnevernet), Fjord dares to imagine a scenario where well-intentioned progressive values can backfire as severely as rigidly conservative ones if they disregard basic human principles like empathy, compassion, and respect.

Written by Mungiu, Fjord follows Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a Romanian engineer and Norwegian nurse played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, respectively. Set in their modest ways, the couple tries to settle into their lives in Norway, having moved there after the death of Mihai’s parents to be closer to Lisbet’s family. Raising their five children with a conservative ethos, they don’t quite mesh with the liberal community that surrounds them. But their eager kids still build close friendships with the children of their progressive neighbors, Mats and Mia Halberg, a development that further underscores the two families’—and consequently, the two belief systems’—political and practical differences.

Tensions rise in town when the kids’ school raises child-abuse allegations against the Gheorghius after teachers notice some mysterious bruising on one of their kids. While the film never spells out their precise origins, Barnevernet steps in at once, separating their five kids (including a baby, still breastfeeding) from Mihai and Lisbet, placing them in foster care after the couple admits to some physical discipline that would be considered mild in Mihai’s culture, but is against the law in Norway. Claiming that they are being harshly discriminated against due to their religion and conservative beliefs,  the couple asks help from Mia, an attorney, to represent their case in the Norwegian court.

The real court case that loosely inspired Fjord

Joining TIME on Zoom recently, Mungiu emphasizes that “the film is fictional. It’s not a reenactment associated with any one particular case.” Still, there were a number of real-life court cases that intrigued him as a storyteller with a journalism background. Chief among them was that of the Bodnariu family, who occupied international headlines for several months after they were separated from their five children in November 2015. Pentecostal parents Ruth and Marius were accused of domestic violence, with worldwide protests criticizing what dissenters called harsh and hasty steps taken by Norwegian social workers without proper evidence. In Romania, one of the indirect results of the wildly popular case went as far as a constitutional referendum in 2018 that aimed to alter the definition of a traditional family and prevent same-sex marriages. (The referendum eventually failed due to low turnout.)

“So you couldn’t avoid the Bodnariu case,” recalls Mungiu. He followed the story as it remained in the papers, and during that time and the years that followed, Mungiu began to notice other cases that displayed a similar pattern. “Whenever there was this encounter between, let's say, families coming to Scandinavia from more conservative parts of the world, there was a cultural clash.” What eventually convinced him to pursue the topic through a film was a recent-enough realization that the world somehow became more illiberal than it used to be. “I thought that through this story, I could talk about the [confrontational] state of the world today. People are not listening to the other group. I hope that the world can be a bit more rational than this.”

Upon deciding to write Fjord, Mungiu read everything he could online, moving to Norway for several extended periods to investigate the country’s child-protection laws and relevant cases on the ground. His process involved talking to several families involved with child protection cases and their relatives, as well as journalists who covered cases like the Bodnarius’, court interpreters, police officers, NGO representatives, and various different religious groups. “Finally, I talked to Barnevernet about these cases in general,” he adds. “They were willing to also give details about how things have changed.”

One key tool Mungiu didn’t have access to was the recording and transcription of the Bodnariu trial, which is among the reasons why Fjord had to be largely fictional. “Norwegian authorities said only the family could have access to the recording if they came over. But the family knew that they couldn’t come over. Because if they did, they could be arrested,” he explains. “The family was trying to get their justice in the European Court of Justice, but they first had to utilize all the legal procedures [in Norway]. And because they left Norway before having a final decision about their proceedings, they couldn't get a positive answer from the European Court of Justice.”

The audience is on trial too

Mungiu draws a direct connection between Fjord and his previous film, R.M.N. “In that film, I was trying to investigate how a conservative society reacts when someone who’s different from them comes into their world. We know that they’re not very welcoming or willing to accept differences. They don't understand that there's a bigger world out there. In Fjord, I really wanted to reverse this paradigm and to understand what happens when the conservatives are the minority in a progressive, liberal society.” According to Mungiu, we might expect that type of society to be more empathetic and inclusive, treating minorities with more compassion. But through his investigations, he got the sense that whoever’s in the majority feels entitled to impose their own point of view onto others. “This is not a good example that we wish to set for the conservative part of the society,” Mungiu reflects. “We shouldn't be behaving the same way they behave.”

On these grounds, the central question of Fjord is whether anyone can be truly objective toward people whose values they don’t share. The Gheorghius’ conservatism, for example, means they oppose same-sex marriage. So can viewers both disagree with the couple on those grounds, while also feel that they are being treated unfairly by Barnevernet?   It is a challenge that is essentially at the heart of the American justice system, which asks potential jurors to set all their biases aside and only assess the case in hand through proven facts. “I noticed that saying, ‘I'm here to [only] judge if they are guilty of what they are charged with’ isn’t easy, because you are biased by your own point of view of the world. But I hope that this is what the audience is going to do. The reason why I wanted to tell this story from this neutral perspective is that it is a rare opportunity of inviting not just one bubble that you sympathize with in your regular life. The other bubble exists and dialogue is needed to make the society a little bit more peaceful again. So I took this position of a mediator, if you will.”

A visual style in service of the film’s thesis

To accentuate the connection between Fjord’s searching themes and lean visuals, Mungiu purposefully embraced long shots and continuous takes beginning during the scripting phase, in order to fully immerse the audience in the conflicting world of the characters in a neutral fashion. Indicating that he avoids many of the mainstream filmmaking methods that he finds manipulative, “I don't use anything [distracting] within the scene,” Mungiu says. “I don't use coverage. I don't use music. I don't have funny angles. The camera doesn't move unless it follows a movement in the shot. I try to do this in a sober way, just with the actors and their emotions. I think it's a respectful way of telling the audience, ‘You are adults like we are, you are as smart as I am, so feel free to see [for yourself] what's more important in this shot, or who the main character is.’”

Similarly, he carefully scouted locations in sync with his ideas around isolation and lack of communication. “It was important for us to set this story in a small community, with two houses at the end of this fjord in a lovely but somehow curled world,” he explains. “It’s very majestic, and [it’s a location where] people will have to talk to one another eventually because there's nobody else around.”

He remembers an anecdote about the real inhabitants of the two houses he uses in the film for the Gheorghius and Halbergs, who were in fact not communicating with one another. That all changed shortly after the production convinced one of them to allow the film crew to shoot in his house. Mungiu recalls the homeowner saying, “I will let you, but my neighbor is very grumpy. He hasn’t talked to me in the 10 years that we have been neighbors, so you are going to have problems with him." But when the crew contacted the owner of the other house, they found that he was quite open-minded. “We asked him, ‘Do you have a conflict with your neighbor?’ He said, ‘No, but none of us have started a conversation, so I let him enjoy his privacy.’ At the end, they were communicating normally, and we had a very good relationship with both of them.”

Can a person ever really be fully objective?

No matter how neutral Mungiu tried to stay throughout his research process, there were some moments that made him face his own biases. “I went [to Norway] with this idea that I will meet a society that is not at all religious. This is the idea that we project onto the Protestant north.” As such, he was surprised to notice deeply rooted religious leanings there, especially among older people with a connection to the Norwegian church. He also learned about the younger population’s attraction to new neo-cult movements. “I watched at least a couple of documentaries about this phenomenon. People are really worried that the younger generations are [drawn to] these new cults. So I noticed that the people there are just as inclined to have religious beliefs as any other.”

With this discovery, Mungiu eventually eliminated various scenes in Fjord which would have insinuated that Norwegian people saw the world in a more rational way only because they weren’t religious. “Making decisions on rational grounds is of course a very good thing to do,” Mungiu explains. “But [there is also] this need of belonging to something bigger than just [rationality] that we all feel. Some people still long for the discomfort that there's something bigger than them. And as long as this belief places them on the right side of the world through [tolerance] and [inclusivity], I think we should be tolerant to it.”

“You shouldn't answer radicalization with radicalization”

His time in Norway also led Mungiu to learn more about the Sami people. “I didn’t know much about them before, but the Sami population sets a good [historical] example about how bigger communities and countries were not acting in an ethical way towards minorities. You can see this in the U.S. as well, [in the way] Native Americans were treated,” he adds. “And I think that we should learn from this [that] maybe this ‘we want to civilize you’ idea is not the most ethical one,” he reflects, clarifying that while everyone should obey the laws and respect the culture of the country they live in, real integration cannot happen by enforcing one’s own values onto others. “That won't change [the way] someone thinks. You will just frustrate them, [reinforcing] that there is a hypocrisy in the world.”

Mungiu cautions against the ongoing ideological war that he says is moving in the wrong direction across the globe. “I don't want to be preachy, but hopefully there's something that stays with you after you watch a film like Fjord,” he reflects. “I took the risk of talking about things that people need to listen to even if they’re not nice. Don't kill the messenger. It's time to start to have a dialogue and this is what cinema can do.”