She really is a scream. It’s hard to imagine a better fit for the raven-black shoes of Wednesday Addams than Jenna Ortega, whose deadpan demeanor and saucer eyes turned Tim Burton’s franchise spin-off into a phenomenon. In Season 2, Wednesday is back at Nevermore Academy, where to her chagrin, she’s gone from outcast to hero. Worse, her annoying brother, Pugsley, is on campus, and she’s having visions of roommate Enid’s death. Clashes with mother Morticia continue, but she gains an ally when Grandmama visits. Steve Buscemi and Lady Gaga join the fun. Wednesday, Aug. 6, Netflix 

by Shawn Levy

“It’s easy now to forget just how unusual Clint Eastwood’s rise was,” said Anthony Paletta in The Washington Examiner. A child of the Depression and a California native, he took up acting because he was told he looked the part. But his screen career was going nowhere until he was cast as a sidekick in TV’s Rawhide, and he was 37 when the three Italian Westerns he made with director Sergio Leone finally made him a movie star in America. That same year, he took his first step toward directing by starting his own production company, and today, at 95, he’s still making films and has earned a new biography. After a 1996 hagiography and a 2002 hatchet job, “what readers needed was some balance,” and that is what Shawn Levy’s new book achieves. The veteran critic proves an astute judge of Eastwood’s work and “an unusually fair evaluator of Eastwood’s politics.” 

“Eastwood is not an easy person to biographize,” said Jonathan Russell Clark in The Washington Post. “The many things that make him a fascinating figure—his iconic roles, his prolific output, his rightwing politics, his sexual miscreancy, his alleged cruelty—make him both a rich and risky subject.” At the same time, the story of his long career since 1967 “isn’t inherently dramatic.” Levy mostly focuses on Eastwood’s many films. He describes Dirty Harry, the hit 1971 film about a vigilante detective that made the star a conservative hero, as gripping propaganda. And when he tackles the 40 films Eastwood has directed, he’s as sharp on the 1992 masterpiece Unforgiven as he is on less-­remembered efforts. But Levy’s cinematic tour “sits uncomfortably” next to occasional descriptions of Eastwood’s rampant infidelity, violent outbursts, and his vicious treatment of actress Sondra Locke after their 1989 split. 

Levy “doesn’t hold back” in detailing such ugly incidents, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But the great value of his book lies in its insights into Eastwood as a director. He characterizes Eastwood as “a capital-L Libertarian,” then shows how, by working cost-effectively on every film from 1971’s Play Misty for Me to last year’s Juror #2, he has secured creative freedom and mastered a style in which story and performances unfold uninhibited. Along the way, Eastwood “has translated his belief in personal responsibility and personal freedom into art.” Far from advocating for the unchecked individual exercise of power, he has constantly highlighted the risks and responsibilities of asserting power. Levy recognizes this about Eastwood, “showing that his glorious body of work reverberates with a sense of history because his worldview is itself a historical throwback.”

The heavy metal howler who became a reality-show dad

Ozzy Osbourne was the original heavy metal wild man. Both as singer for the British metal pioneers Black Sabbath and as a solo artist, the tattooed, wildeyed “Prince of Darkness” was famous as much for his staggering substance intake and drug-fueled antics as for his keening wail. His most notorious act, in 1982, was biting the head off a dead bat that had been thrown onstage. (He thought it was a toy and said it had “the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine.”) Another time, while meeting with record executives, he chomped off the head of a live dove— or two doves; accounts vary. He claimed that he dropped LSD daily for two years and at the height of his booze addiction drained four bottles of cognac a day. To millions of TV viewers, though, Osbourne was known as the amiable, befuddled patriarch on the hit MTV reality show The Osbournes, which debuted in 2002. The menacing Ozzy had been “the guy I created for the stage,” Osbourne said. “But at the end of the day, I was him 24/7.” 

John Michael Osbourne was raised in the gritty English city of Birmingham, where his father was a toolmaker and his mother a factory worker, said The Times (U.K.). Given his ADHD and dyslexia, “school was a disaster,” and he was “obsessed with morbid fantasies,” such as murdering his mother. “Music was an escape” for the Beatles-smitten kid. He left school at 15 to do odd jobs, at one point working in an abattoir, but after he served six weeks in prison for robbery he “resolved to become a singer” and posted an ad at a local music shop. He soon met his bandmates, and in 1969, Black Sabbath released an eponymous album that “laid out their sonic template,” said The New York Times: “deafening volume and grinding tempos, with Osbourne yowling about portents of doom.” The follow-up, Paranoid, went platinum. Despite critical drubbings, more million-sellers followed, and songs like “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became “anthems for disaffected youth.” 

Osbourne’s drug use accelerated, and the band fired him in 1979, said The Guardian. But with help from his second wife, Sharon, who doubled as his manager, he launched an “immediately successful” solo act. His 1980 debut, Blizzard of Ozz, sold 6 million copies. Other hit albums followed, but “controversy was never far away.” Soon after the bat incident, he was arrested in San Antonio for urinating on the Alamo while clad in a dress. In 1986, his song “Suicide Solution” was blamed for a teen’s suicide; in 1989, he was arrested for attempting to strangle Sharon while blackout drunk. That scary episode prompted one of his numerous stints in rehab. 

By the late 1990s, “Osbourne was metal’s ringmaster,” said Rolling Stone, headlining the annual Ozzfest tour. “Then came The Osbournes,” which revealed his “softer side” as the foulmouthed dad to a “lovingly dysfunctional family.” The show made him a “darling of Midwestern moms,” and he even performed for Queen Elizabeth’s 50th anniversary on the throne. After years of announcing his retirement but then continuing on, Osbourne canceled shows in 2020 to undergo treatment for Parkinson’s; at a Black Sabbath reunion last month, he performed sitting down. However his story ended, he said, he knew how he’d be remembered. “Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.”