New this week: ‘Day Shift’ and ‘Five Days at Memorial’
MOVIES
One of the best movies of the year is finally streaming. “Belle,” Mamoru Hosoda’s tour-de-force anime of startling emotional depth, is now up on HBO Max, playing in an English dub. You may have missed it when it arrived in theaters back in early January, but “Belle” is worth catching up to.
Every month, the Restoration Screening Room hosts live, free screenings of restored classics from Film Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Martin Scorsese. On Monday at 7 p.m. EDT, the virtual theater launched this spring will host a compelling noir double feature of Arthur Ripley’s “The Chase” (1946) and Edgar G. Ulmer’s “Detour” (1945). Both take roadway encounters in deliciously dark directions that still feels unpredictable and fresh.
In “Day Shift,” premiering Friday on Netflix, Jamie Foxx plays a blue-collar pool-cleaning father with a secretive side-gig: hunting and killing vampires for money. Dave Franco and Snoop Dogg co-star. “Vampires, they live amongst us,” Foxx tells Franco in the trailer. “And all they are is murderers. It’s not ‘Eclipse, New Moon, Breaking Dawn Part 1’ — it ain’t like that.”
TELEVISION
Among the pleasures of Peak TV is the room it makes for familiar and welcome faces. Acorn TV’s “Darby and Joan,” starring Bryan Brown (”Cocktail,” “Breaker Morant”) and Greta Scacchi (”Emma,” “The Player”) is such a project. Brown’s Jack Darby is a retired Australian homicide detective who takes to the road with pooch Diesel to leave the past behind. Darby crosses paths in the outback with Scacchi’s Joan, a recently widowed English nurse and, yes, opposite do attract. There’s also mysterious events to investigate in the road trip drama debuting Monday and with two episodes arriving weekly through Aug.
29 on the streaming service.
Are the Taliban adhering to their vow to respect women’s rights in Afghanistan a year after the U.S. withdrawal? A PBS “Frontline” investigation found instead what it calls a “harrowing” story. The film debuts Tuesday on PBS stations (check local listings for time) and will stream at pbs.org/frontline.
“Five Days at Memorial” dramatizes the torment that 2005’s Hurricane Katrina visited on a New Orleans hospital, including the loss of life that led to criminal charges. Based on physician and reporter Sheri Fink’s book, “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a StormRavaged Hospital,” the Apple TV+ series is from John Ridley (”12 Years a Slave”) and Carlton Cuse (”Lost”), its producers, writers and, with Wendey Stanzler, directors. Vera Farmiga, Cornelius Smith Jr. and Cherry Jones are among
the cast members in the limited series debuting with three episodes on Friday, with a new episode out weekly through Sept. 16.
MUSIC
The Roots’ Black Thought and superproducer Danger Mouse have partnered for the album “Cheat Codes,” with the first single being “No Gold Teeth.” Danger Mouse and Black Thought had collaborated on music in the early 2000s, but shelved it. They rekindled their collaboration for the new album, out Friday.
Fans of Goo Goo Dolls will ignore superstition as the band releases its 13th studio album, “Chaos in Bloom.” Frontman John Rzeznik produces for the first time and the band says it is an album of “biting sarcasm, stadium-ready choruses” and “spear-sharp songwriting.”