A six-episode, behind-the-scenes Disney+ docuseries about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, are some of the new television, films, music and games headed to a device near you.
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time this week: Chip and Joanna Gaines take on a big job revamping a small home in the mountains of Colorado, video gamers can skateboard through hell in Sam Eng’s Skate Story and Rob Reiner gets the band back together for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
MOVIES
Photo: AP
■ Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man arrives on Netflix today. Religion is at the heart of this installment, which finds Daniel Craig’s dapper detective Benoit Blanc trying to solve the “locked room” murder of Josh Brolin’s Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a charismatic and terrifying church leader with a devoted set of followers. The large ensemble cast includes Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner and Kerry Washington. Some were less than delighted by this outing, however. In his review for The Associated Press, Mark Kennedy called it, “a gloomy and clunky outing that may test fans’ faith in the filmmaker.”
■ Brad Pitt plays a washed-up driver looking for glory on the racetrack in the Formula One movie F1, streaming on Apple TV beginning today. Filmmaker Joseph Kosinski wanted to make it feel as exciting and authentic as possible: In many scenes, it really is Pitt and Damson Idris driving those cars at 180 mph. Film Writer Jake Coyle wrote in his review that it’s, “a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor.”
■ Rob Reiner got the band back together for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which begins streaming on HBO Max today. Was it a mistake to revisit the great 1984 mockumentary, though? Mark Kennedy wrote in his review that, “Despite some great starry cameos — Paul McCartney’s is easily the best — Spinal Tap II leans into the old favorite bits too needily and is suffocated by the constantly looming presence of death, a downer. The improv-based comedy is forced and the laughs barely register. This is a movie only for die-hard Tappers.”
Photo: AP
— AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr
MUSIC
■ It is Taylor Swift’s world and we’re just living in it. Prepare yourself for two new projects at Disney+. That’s a six-episode, behind-the-scenes docuseries about her landmark “Eras Tour” titled Taylor Swift ‘The Eras Tour’ The End of an Era — the first two episodes will premiere today. And that is not to be confused with the second, titled Taylor Swift ‘The Eras Tour’ The Final Show, a concert film now with the inclusion of The Tortured Poets Department section. The 2024 album was incorporated into her three-and-a-half-hour performance following its release. It was filmed in Vancouver. (That differs from 2023’s Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, which was compiled from several Swift shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles and arrived ahead of The Tortured Poets Department.) Swifties, rise!
Photo: AP
■ It has been a big year for collaborative rap records (looking at you, Clipse) and that continues into 2025’s 11th hour with Light-Years, a new release from rapper Nas and record producer DJ Premier. They’re greats for a reason.
■ The Grammy-award winning producer, DJ and electronic musician Fred Again will release the next iteration of his USB series, the 16-track USB002, today. Expect the unexpected: The first song released from the collection is you’re a star, which features Australian punky-pop band Amyl and The Sniffers. The club sounds a little different this time around.
— AP Music Writer Maria Sherman
NEW SERIES
■ Chip and Joanna Gaines have long said they would not do any fixer uppers outside of central Texas. Until now. The couple has taken on a big job revamping a small 1960s home in the mountains of Colorado. Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain House is on Magnolia Network and HGTV and streams on HBO Max and Discovery+.
■ Percy Jackson, the son of Poseidon, returns to with Season 2 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. The series, starring Walker Scobell in the title role, adapts The Sea of Monsters, the second novel in a book series by Rick Riordan. A two-hour season premiere is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
■ He helped to launch American Idol and created America’s Got Talent and the group One Direction. Now, cameras follow Simon Cowell as he seeks to form a new boy band in Simon Cowell: The Next Act. The docuseries is about both his search and Cowell himself. He prides himself on discovering an “it” factor. “When you’re putting a band together, it’s like mining for diamonds,” he said in the trailer. “If this goes wrong, it will be ‘Simon Cowell has lost it.’”
■ Diane Kruger stars in a new drama for Paramount+ called Little Disasters as Jess, a mother who takes her son to the hospital for a head injury. The doctor, who is also a friend, becomes suspicious of Jess’ description of what happened and calls the authorities. It’s based on a novel of the same name. All six-episodes are already streaming.
— Alicia Rancilio
VIDEO GAMES
■ I’ve skateboarded all over the world in various video games, but one location remains untouched by my deck: hell. Solo designer Sam Eng aims to correct that omission with Skate Story. You are a skateboarder made of glass in an underworld filled with demons, who can only be defeated by unleashing your gnarliest tricks. The only way to escape is to swallow the moon. If you love classics like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater but wish they were more hallucinatory, this might be the ride for you. Kick off Monday on PlayStation 5, Switch 2 or PC.
— Lou Kesten
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS