Julia is an American television series created by Daniel Goldfarb that premiered on HBO Max on March 31, 2022. It is based on the life of television chef Julia Child. In May 2022, the series was renewed for a second season.
I did not think I would like this series; for one, Meryl Streep owned the character in "Julie & Julia", along with Stanley Tucci as Paul, but half way into the first episode, I was totally absorbed into the story and the characters. Just superbly cast, well acted, the sets and the locations bring back a lot of memories.
I lived in Cambridge MA for a year or so back in the 80's, and Julia Child was a frequent sighting around Harvard Square - I would see her frequently in the bookstores and coffee shops. She was a presence, even without muttering a word.
Sarah Lancashire and David Hyde-Pierce are superb. They are Julia and Paul Child. Boston of that era was a bastion of equality, but still a product of it's time. I am glad to see that the writing is not telling a "woke" story, but an honest characterization of that time. There are times the show is as gritty as it WAS back then. Having LIVED through those times, this is about as honest portrayal as I could imagine.
Updated 21/11/2018 My Brilliant Friend is an Italian-American drama television miniseriesbased on the novel of the same nameby Elena Ferrante. It is the first of four novels in the Neapolitan Novels series to be adapted for television.[1] An eight-episode miniseries, My Brilliant Friend is a co-production between American premium cable network HBO and Italian networks RAI and TIMvision.[2] It premiered on HBO on November 18, 2018
A second season, based on Ferrante's second Neapolitan Novel and titled My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name (Italian: L'amica geniale - Storia del nuovo cognome), was confirmed in December 2018,[5] and premiered on Rai 1 on February 10, 2020, and on HBO on March 16, 2020.[6][7] The first two episodes of the second season were released in Italian cinemas from January 27–29, 2020.[6]
On April 30, 2020, the series was renewed for a third season, to be based on the third novel in the series Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.[8]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the second season has a 100% "certified fresh" rating with an average score of 9 out of 10 based on 11 reviews. The site's critical consensus is, "Gorgeously shot and full of incredible performances, My Brilliant Friend's second season expands its small world with rich results."[44] On Metacritic, it has a score of 91 out of 100 based on 7 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[45]
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.
The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.
CHILDHOOD. The Story of Don Achille
1
My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille’s apartment.
I remember the violet light of the courtyard, the smells of a warm spring evening. The mothers were making dinner, it was time to go home, but we delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage. For some time, in school and outside of it, that was what we had been doing. Lila would thrust her hand and then her whole arm into the black mouth of a manhole, and I, in turn, immediately did the same, my heart pounding, hoping that the cockroaches wouldn’t run over my skin, that the rats wouldn’t bite me. Lila climbed up to Signora Spagnuolo’s ground-floor window, and, hanging from the iron bar that the clothesline was attached to, swung back and forth, then lowered herself down to the sidewalk, and I immediately did the same, although I was afraid of falling and hurting myself. Lila stuck into her skin the rusted safety pin that she had found on the street somewhere but kept in her pocket like the gift of a fairy godmother; I watched the metal point as it dug a whitish tunnel into her palm, and then, when she pulled it out and handed it to me, I did the same.
At some point she gave me one of her firm looks, eyes narrowed, and headed toward the building where Don Achille lived. I was frozen with fear. Don Achille was the ogre of fairy tales, I was absolutely forbidden to go near him, speak to him, look at him, spy on him, I was to act as if neither he nor his family existed. Regarding him there was, in my house but not only mine, a fear and a hatred whose origin I didn’t know. The way my father talked about him, I imagined a huge man, covered with purple boils, violent in spite of the “don,” which to me suggested a calm authority. He was a being created out of some unidentifiable material, iron, glass, nettles, but alive, alive, the hot breath streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought that if I merely saw him from a distance he would drive something sharp and burning into my eyes. So if I was mad enough to approach the door of his house he would kill me.
I waited to see if Lila would have second thoughts and turn back. I knew what she wanted to do, I had hoped that she would forget about it, but in vain. The street lamps were not yet lighted, nor were the lights on the stairs. From the apartments came irritable voices. To follow Lila I had to leave the bluish light of the courtyard and enter the black of the doorway. When I finally made up my mind, I saw nothing at first, there was only an odor of old junk and DDT. Then I got used to the darkness and found Lila sitting on the first step of the first flight of stairs. She got up and we began to climb.
We kept to the side where the wall was, she two steps ahead, I two steps behind, torn between shortening the distance or letting it increase. I can still feel my shoulder inching along the flaking wall and the idea that the steps were very high, higher than those in the building where I lived. I was trembling. Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille’s wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets.
We stopped often, and each time I hoped that Lila would decide to turn back. I was all sweaty, I don’t know about her. Every so often she looked up, but I couldn’t tell at what, all that was visible was the gray areas of the big windows at every landing. Suddenly the lights came on, but they were faint, dusty, leaving broad zones of shadow, full of dangers. We waited to see if it was Don Achille who had turned the switch, but we heard nothing, neither footsteps nor the opening or closing of a door. Then Lila continued on, and I followed.
She thought that what we were doing was just and necessary; I had forgotten every good reason, and certainly was there only because she was. We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.
At the fourth flight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. This gesture changed everything between us forever.
2
It was her fault. Not too long before — ten days, a month, who can say, we knew nothing about time, in those days — she had treacherously taken my doll and thrown her down into a cellar. Now we were climbing toward fear; then we had felt obliged to descend, quickly, into the unknown. Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night. I was small and really my doll knew more than I did. I talked to her, she talked to me. She had a plastic face and plastic hair and plastic eyes. She wore a blue dress that my mother had made for her in a rare moment of happiness, and she was beautiful. Lila’s doll, on the other hand, had a cloth body of a yellowish color, filled with sawdust, and she seemed to me ugly and grimy. The two spied on each other, they sized each other up, they were ready to flee into our arms if a storm burst, if there was thunder, if someone bigger and stronger, with sharp teeth, wanted to snatch them away.
We played in the courtyard but as if we weren’t playing together. Lila sat on the ground, on one side of a small barred basement window, I on the other. We liked that place, especially because behind the bars was a metal grating and, against the grating, on the cement ledge between the bars, we could arrange the things that belonged to Tina, my doll, and those of Nu, Lila’s doll. There we put rocks, bottle tops, little flowers, nails, splinters of glass. I overheard what Lila said to Nu and repeated it in a low voice to Tina, slightly modified. If she took a bottle top and put it on her doll’s head, like a hat, I said to mine, in dialect, Tina, put on your queen’s crown or you’ll catch cold. If Nu played hopscotch in Lila’s arms, I soon afterward made Tina do the same. Still, it never happened that we decided on a game and began playing together. Even that place we chose without explicit agreement. Lila sat down there, and I strolled around, pretending to go somewhere else. Then, as if I’d given it no thought, I, too, settled next to the cellar window, but on the opposite side.
The thing that attracted us most was the cold air that came from the cellar, a breath that refreshed us in spring and summer. And then we liked the bars with their spiderwebs, the darkness, and the tight mesh of the grating that, reddish with rust, curled up both on my side and on Lila’s, creating two parallel holes through which we could drop rocks into obscurity and hear the sound when they hit bottom. It was all beautiful and frightening then. Through those openings the darkness might suddenly seize the dolls, who sometimes were safe in our arms, but more often were placed deliberately next to the twisted grating and thus exposed to the cellar’s cold breath, to its threatening noises, rustling, squeaking, scraping.
Nu and Tina weren’t happy. The terrors that we tasted every day were theirs. We didn’t trust the light on the stones, on the buildings, on the scrubland beyond the neighborhood, on the people inside and outside their houses. We imagined the dark corners, the feelings repressed but always close to exploding. And to those shadowy mouths, the caverns that opened beyond them under the buildings, we attributed everything that frightened us in the light of day. Don Achille, for example, was not only in his apartment on the top floor but also down below, a spider among spiders, a rat among rats, a shape that assumed all shapes. I imagined him with his mouth open because of his long animal fangs, his body of glazed stone and poisonous grasses, always ready to pick up in an enormous black bag anything we dropped through the torn corners of the grate. That bag was a fundamental feature of Don Achille, he always had it, even at home, and into it he put material both living and dead.
Lila knew that I had that fear, my doll talked about it out loud. And so, on the day we exchanged our dolls for the first time — with no discussion, only looks and gestures — as soon as she had Tina, she pushed her through the grate and let her fall into the darkness.
His Dark Materials is a television fantasy series based on the trilogy of novels by Philip Pullman. It is produced by New Line Cinema and Bad Wolf for BBC One and HBO. The eight-episode series premiered on 3 November 2019 on BBC One in the United Kingdom and 4 November on HBO in the United States . His Dark Materials is set in an alternative world where all humans have animal companions called dæmons, which are the manifestation of the human soul. The series follows the life of young Lyra (Dafne Keen) who is an orphan living with the scholars at Jordan College, Oxford. As in Pullman's novel, Lyra discovers a dangerous secret that involves Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) and Marisa Coulter (Ruth Wilson). In her search for her missing friend, Lyra also uncovers a series of kidnappings and its link to the mysterious substance called Dust. Director Otto Bathurst explained that some elements of the book and film had been changed to give the series a more modern feel, compared to the original's Victoriana fantasy. скачать эпизод первый на англ с англ суб - торрент
Chernobylis a five-part British-American historical drama television miniseries created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck. It was a co-production between the American cable network HBO and the British television network Sky, and premiered in both the United States and the United Kingdom on May 6, 2019. The series depicts the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republicin April 1986 and the unprecedented cleanup efforts that followed. Chernobyl dramatizes "the true story of one of the worst man-made catastrophes in history and tells of the brave men and women who sacrificed themselves to save Europe from unimaginable disaster. The miniseries focuses on the heartbreaking scope of the nuclear plant disasterthat occurred in Soviet Ukraine in April 1986, revealing how and why it happened and telling the shocking, remarkable stories of the heroes who fought and fell."[1]
Chernobyl has received acclaim from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 95% approval rating with an average score of 8.87 out of 10, based on 41 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Chernobyl rivets with a creeping dread that never dissipates, dramatizing a national tragedy with sterling craft and an intelligent dissection of institutional rot."[14] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[15]
Reviewers from The Atlantic, The Washington Post and BBC have noted that the series successfully draw parallels to their contemporaneous society by focusing on the power of information and how dishonest leaders can unintentionally make mistakes beyond their comprehension. Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic hailed the series as a "grim disquisition on the toll of devaluing the truth"; Hank Stuever of The Washington Post praised it for showcasing "what happens when lying is standard and authority is abused".[16][17][18]
On Saturday hundreds of white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to participate in the “Unite the Right” rally. By Saturday evening three people were dead – one protester and two police officers – and many more injured.
“VICE News Tonight” correspondent Elle Reeve went behind the scenes with white nationalist leaders, including Christopher Cantwell, Robert Ray, David Duke, and Matthew Heimbach — as well as counterprotesters. VICE News Tonight also spoke with residents of Charlottesville, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Charlottesville Police.
From the neo-Nazi protests at Emancipation Park to Cantwell’s hideaway outside Virginia, “VICE News Tonight” provides viewers with exclusive, up-close and personal access inside the unrest.
The series premiered on 21 October 2016 on Sky Atlantic in Italy. On 20 October 2016, Wildside producer Lorenzo Mieli announced that a second season of the series is in development.[2]
The Young Pope received widespread critical acclaim in the UK,[19][20] Ireland, and Italy.[21] It has also drawn some criticism from the Italian newspaper Famiglia Cristiana, for the overtly caricatural interpretation by Jude Law.[22] Famiglia Cristiana also outlined how polarizing the series was among Catholics, with many fans of Sorrentino's storytelling and many who were not impressed.[23]
The Night Ofis a British/American eight-partHBO and BBC Worldwide television miniseriesbased on Criminal Justice, a 2008–09 British television series.[2] The miniseries was written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, and multiple episodes were directed by Zaillian.[3]The Night Of premiered on July 10, 2016.[4][5]The first episode premiered early on June 24, 2016, via HBO on-demand.[6]
The Bolshoi is worshipped as Russia's national treasure by its many fans. But in 2013 the theatre hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons - Sergei Filin, director of the ballet company, nearly lost his eyesight when a masked man threw acid in his face. It triggered months of intrigue and scandal, with both performers and managers desperate to repair the damage.
Now, for the first time, filmmakers have been granted uncensored access backstage to record an entire season. This film follows performers and managers as they attempt to reclaim their reputation. New director Vladimir Urin vows to resist meddling from the Kremlin, but his antipathy towards Sergei Filin spills out into the open. Away from the backstabbing and political intrigue, it is left to the dancers to keep the prestige and legacy of Russia's most famous theatre intact.