The drama series For All Mankind depicted an alternate history of the space race, in which the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon, and the men and women of NASA doubled down on the space program in a bid to catch up. This spin-off flips the coin, focusing on the Soviet space program post-victory, as it operates out of a massive hive called Star City. With paranoia at a fever pitch, the totalitarian powers that be are determined to establish a lunar base and catch a mole inside the program. Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin lead the cast.
Friday, May 29, Apple TV 

by Beverly Gage

“In one obvious respect, This Land Is Your Land is perfectly timed,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Our country’s looming semiquincentennial inspired historian Beverly Gage to embark on the “companionable” national tour she chronicles here. In 2023 and 2024, the Pulitzer Prize– winning author visited roughly 300 historical sites associated with particular events, choosing to focus on just 13, which she presents in chronological order. Because Gage avoids venerating or condemning her countrymen for past deeds, “what comes through is how complicated and just plain weird a lot of American history is.” The sites she visits are “often marked by contradiction,” which Gage “highlights to powerful effect.” And while her accounts of past events are never divisive, “as a historian, she knows that none of the attempts to fulfill the Declaration’s promise of freedom and equality has ever come easily.”

The film critic who loved a good takedown

If Rex Reed didn’t like a film, everyone felt it. Credited with helping transform plot-driven film criticism into its own snappy literary genre, Reed wrote vivacious columns and interviews that appeared everywhere from Vogue to GQ to The New York Observer, decade after decade. While effusive about Golden Age stars like Bette Davis, he could be harshly critical of up-and-comers like Barbra Streisand, whom he publicly skewered for showing up late to their sit-down. Yet even at his prickliest, Reed had a knack for getting celebrities to open up and say things they’d later regret. “I have an empathy for their pain,” he said, “which often leads them to tell me more than they realize.”

Rex Taylor Reed was born in Fort Worth, but his father’s oil job sent the family on a yearslong voyage across the South. An only child who moved too often to have friends, Reed had the movies instead, and “went to theaters every day,” said The New York Times. So of course he wanted to make watching movies his work too. In his late 20s, he attended the Venice Film Festival, where he “bluffed his way into interviews with Buster Keaton and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

Reed didn’t speak French, and Belmondo didn’t speak English, “so the authenticity of the quotes attributed to the actor were, as the French might say, discutable.” But Reed sold the stories, and his career took off. By the 1980s he was co-host of a TV show, At the Movies, and appeared frequently as a guest of Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson.

Reed gathered many of his profiles and interviews in his eight books. The first one, Do You Sleep in the Nude? drew its title from “the kind of query he designed to provoke,” said Deadline. And his provocations could turn cruel. When Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won the 1987 Oscar for best actress, Reed called it a “pity vote,” and he falsely claimed that Marisa Tomei’s best supporting actress win for 1992’s My Cousin Vinny was the result of the presenter reading the wrong name. “Reed was vilified,” said The Hollywood Reporter, but he refused to drop his conspiracy theory. He didn’t soften as he aged — he branded 2017’s best picture winner The Shape of Water “a loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel ”— but he denied that he was a curmudgeon. “I like just as many films as I dislike,” he said in 2018. “But I think we’re drowning in mediocrity. I just try as hard as I can to raise the level of consciousness.”