Completed Welles work is TV-movie highlight
Sometimes what we want to watch must be deep enough to engage, yet not such a time commitment that we feel we’re matriculating. It’s then that we crave movies we can watch at home.
An impressive array on television this fall offers several, including a must-see from Orson Welles.
“The Other Side of the Wind” was Welles’ labor of unrequited love, begun in 1970 and finally abandoned in 1979, beset by financial woes and legal complications. Now, nearly 40 years
after the filmmaker’s death, Netflix has financed its completion and the excitement among cineastes is high. Starring John Huston as an esteemed but embattled director, it premieres Nov. 2.
While we’re on larger-than-life characters, “King Lear,” starring Anthony Hopkins as the mad monarch and Emma Thompson as Goneril, begins streaming on Amazon on Friday, Sept. 28.
Set in London, the lush production updates the setting but keeps the language and lets Hopkins parry with worthy co-stars Jim Broadbent (“Iris,” “The Iron Lady”) and Emily Watson (“Punch Drunk Love”). Another plus: Director Richard Eyre’s adaptation comes in at a tidy two hours.
Also available Friday is Netflix’s “Hold the Dark,” starring Jeffrey Wright (“Angels in America”) as a wolf expert who heads into Alaska’s tundra searching for a child after other children are feared killed by the predators.
The following week, two actors always worth watching, Paul Giamatti (“Billions”) and Kathryn Hahn (“Transparent”), show up in “Private Life,” playing a couple struggling with infertility. (Netflix, Friday, Oct. 5).
While these films log in at the standard time of a couple of hours, the new season also offers that relatively new hybrid, the anthology series, which can often feel like a string of related movies. They may be hard to categorize but, luckily for audiences, these projects often attract top directors and actors.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” returns to TV with the anticipated anthology series “The Romanoffs,” about people who claim to be Czarist heirs (Amazon, Oct. 12).
Each episode features different characters; look for John Slattery, Christina Hendricks and other “Mad Men” alums.
Another standout is “Escape at Dannemora” (Showtime, Nov. 18), a captivating drama about the prison breakout that grabbed headlines three years ago. Starring Benicio Del Toro as a con and Patricia Arquette — unrecognizable under makeup and prosthetics — as a lonely prison worker, the film was shot in the upstate New York penitentiary.
Executive producer and director Ben Stiller acknowledges there were challenges from the beginning.
“At first they were a little bit trepidatious of what we are doing there, to be honest — how we were going to portray the story,” Stiller said at the Television Critics Association summer tour.
“I think probably knowing that I was directing it, they probably assumed it was going to be comedic or attempting to be comedic, and so it took a little bit of time to explain to them what we were doing.”
The result is a captivating look at how a bored and unhappy woman ends up falling for desperate inmates whose only goal is to escape.
The next evening brings a miniseries spread over three nights, “The Little Drummer Girl” starring Alexander Skarsgård (“Big Little Lies”).
Based on spy master John le Carré’s novel, it’s a Cold War story that follows what happens after a bombing in an Israeli attache’s home in the former West Germany (AMC, Nov. 19).
These make an eclectic fall lineup, featuring a great auteur and some masterful writers. But another TV movie genre should be mentioned, too — holiday films.
AMC, Disney Channel, Freeform and Syfy will chime in with a month’s worth of spooky films, from cute ghosts for the Disney crowd to watch-with-thelights-on shockers for Syfy’s audience.
During Syfy’s “31 Days of Halloween,” the network will show five new movies including “Karma” (Oct. 13), with Mandela Van Peebles (“Jigsaw”) as a heartless landlord; we suspect karma is going to catch up with him.
Also lurking is “Dead in the Water” (Oct. 27), as a ship’s allfemale crew confronts a mysterious invader. Nikohl Boosheri (“The Bold Type”) stars.
The official end to the fall season’s TV movies comes when Christmas films take over the networks. Sure, they’re easy to mock, given their white-bread casts and relentlessly upbeat endings, but you can’t deride their numbers. (Last season, Hallmark’s two channels edged out all other networks with 85 million viewers tuning in.)
The first of these, “Christmas at Pemberley Manor,” airs Oct. 27, before a single trick-or-treater hits the streets.