Clockwise from top: Saltburn, Napoleon, Fargo season five, Squid Game: The Challenge. Photo Illustration: Vulture
The holidays are just around the corner and it’s time for a trip to the TV and the movies. If you’re lucky (i.e. you live at the Paris Theater in New York City), you’ll be able to see what Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is about. For the rest of us, Ridley Scott’s latest historical war epic, Emerald Fennell’s sparkling little 2000s-style thriller, a new Disney animated film, and even a free classic Peanuts special are available to take your mind off the Thanksgiving craziness. Enjoy. –Savannah Salazar
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Jon Hamm and Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple lead the fifth season of Fargo as housewife Dorothy “Dot” Lyon and the sheriff, respectively, search for her. Joining Temple and Hamm this season are Joe Keery as Gator, the sheriff’s son; Lamorne Morris; Richa Moorjani; Sam Spruell; and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Fargo takes on its most recent time period to date: 2019. -SS
It’s incredibly depressing, but perhaps inevitable, that a TV show about a horribly degrading and brutal competition between desperate contestants looking for a payday would spawn a reality TV spinoff featuring desperate contestants looking for a payday looking for a payday, compete against each other in a terribly humiliating and brutal competition. –Roxana Hadadi
➽ I would easily win the Squid Game, but I’m built differently.
Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s second film is sure to cause major divisions in your group chats. Starring Barry Keoghan as another bit of weirdo, Saltburn follows a young man’s (Keoghan) psychosexual obsession with an Oxford classmate, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), as he befriends him and spends the summer at Catton’s family estate, Saltburn. spends. A chaotic, nasty mess ensues, and you’ll either love it or hate it – or perhaps have a secret third feeling, an affinity for seeing Elordi and Keoghan as sick freaks. All valid. —SS
Ridley Scott has been on a veritable press tour for his new epic, essentially telling historians and anyone who cares about little things like “historical accuracy” to get to work. If you’re looking for nuance and context for your story about Napoleon’s rise and fall (and rise and fall), you may not find it here. But you’ll find epic battles and lots of surprisingly funny scenes where Joaquin Phoenix is a strange little guy. Sometimes that’s enough. –James Grebey
➽ Seriously, go see Napoleon. We owe it to Sir Ridley for making The Last Duel so dirty. Sorry my generation was too busy with our cell phones, King.
Fifteen years ago, Baz Luhrmann directed and co-wrote the flop “Australia,” a sprawling war epic starring the fantastically hot Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman and exquisite scenery. In “Faraway Downs,” described as a “reimagining” of the film, Luhrmann expands the nearly three-hour story into a six-part miniseries with new footage and an alternate ending. –RH
➽ Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” will be in select theaters this weekend ahead of its Netflix streaming debut on December 20th.
The Thanksgiving Day Parade is midway through. Too many sequences in which very cool Broadway dancers perform an out-of-context snippet of a song from the particular show they’re in, too little footage of large balloons and floats. The real draw is the National Dog Show, which begins after the parade ends at noon ET. Look at all the good boys and girls! –JG
Begins at 12pm EST on NBC
➽ Are there football games on Thanksgiving? But let’s be honest: we’re indoor kids. Look for that stuff somewhere else.
Watching Joel (or Mike) (or Jonah) and his robot friends Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot watch bad movies is as much a Thanksgiving tradition as arguing with your uncle at the table. This year, 24 classic episodes will be streamed on a variety of different services, including Pluto TV and Twitch. Enjoy these absolute movie turkeys. –JG
One of the most memorable Peanuts TV specials of all time turns 50 this year. However, it won’t be celebrated by airing on television as Apple acquired the rights to all of them a few years ago. At least it will be available to stream for free on Apple TV+ for a limited time on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving. If you want to watch the gang serve up a feast of popcorn, buttered toast and jelly beans beforehand, you’ll have to pay. —Eric Vilas-Boas
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
David Tennant is back for the long-running sci-fi series’ 60th anniversary special, but he won’t be reprising his role as the Tenth Doctor. Instead, he’s the 14th Doctor – although the cast has already confirmed that actor Ncuti Gatwa will ultimately play the next version of the Doctor once the series gets taken seriously again next year. This all makes perfect sense in context, I promise. Mostly. –JG
When you’re surrounded by screaming, chattering, Cheeto-dusted children day after day, it’s normal to feel your age – even more so when you happen to be a 75-year-old lizard. In “Leo,” Adam Sandler plays the lead role of the eponymous septuagenarian class reptile who is faced with a late-life crisis: he realizes that he has only ever lived in glass. When he tries to change that before his time is up, it becomes slightly existential, very musical, and overall quite entertaining. —EVB
Disney is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a new original animated film that’s very aware that it’s celebrating a century of Disney, with plenty of nods to old classics and the return of a pure Disney villain for the first time in a decade (courtesy Permit). by Chris Pine’s King Magnifico). Ariana DeBose plays Asha, a young girl who wishes upon a star, and the star itself follows her call. –JG
Hey…remember all of that? The ’90s kids who remember Kenan and Kel’s goofy, charmingly stupid spin-off film Good Burger are now old enough to subscribe to Paramount+ and can watch the sequel, which is just over a quarter century old appears after the original. Wait, no, that can’t be right. That would… make… me… old? –JG
July 2023 was a good time, wasn’t it? Sure, it’s only been four months, but just in time for the holidays, you can finally create your own little Barbenheimer experience at home when Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic finally hits VOD. Grab the fedoras and let Oppenheimer blow out your speakers. —SS
Emerald Fennell said she was inspired to cast Barry Keoghan in Saltburn by Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a disturbing and vicious psychological thriller. He plays a young teenager who slowly intrudes into the lives of a cardiovascular surgeon (played by Colin Farrell) and his family (Nicole Kidman, Sunny Suljic and Raffey Cassidy) – with disastrous consequences. It’s as hard to stomach as the amount of spaghetti Keoghan ate in that one scene. —SS
Want more? Read our recommendations from the weekend of November 17th.