This breathtaking, adrenaline-spiking documentary traces the remarkable career of Sasha DiGiulian, a groundbreaking female rock climber who has logged scores of first ascents, scaling rock faces from Yosemite to Madagascar. A remarkable comeback from multiple reconstructive hip surgeries culminates with DiGiulian's jaw-dropping ascent of Mexico's El Gigante. Tuesday, June 18, at 9 p.m., HBO/Max.

by Randall Sullivan

"The Devil's Best Trick is a master class in the difficult art of first-person, narrative nonfiction," said Clancy Martin in The New York Times. Ever since witnessing an exorcism in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, veteran investigative journalist Randall Sullivan has entertained the idea that the Devil may be real, and his latest book details what he discovered when he immersed himself in the particulars of horrible human violence as well as historic teachings about how evil manifests itself in the world. His account mixes on-the-ground reporting, summaries of arcane debates within early Christianity, and disturbing stories of cannibalism and serial murder. "The writing is never clichéd, nor is the thinking," even as Sullivan's certainty about the Devil's existence grows. "At the start of his journey, Sullivan's not sure if he believes in the Devil; by the end, he is certain that Satan is real."

"A gifted storyteller," Sullivan takes his journalistic quest seriously, said Micah Mattix in The Wall Street Journal. He reinvestigates the deaths of two siblings in Childress, Texas, during the Satanic panic of the 1980s and '90s, and travels to Mexico to participate in a ritual with the cult of Santa Muerte. Alongside such contemporary engagements with evil, Sullivan "traces the idea of a devil from the ancient world to the present." He spotlights Satan's changing role across the Old and New Testaments and gathers theological perspectives from thinkers such as Martin Luther and Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. His account of why belief in the Devil has waned in the West since the 16th century is "plausible, if conventional," and his final conclusion is informed by everything he's learned: "There is a Devil," he writes, "a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it." 

Will readers find that conclusion satisfying? asked Carl Hoffman in The Washington Post. "I wanted so much to love The Devil's Best Trick, but it's a real head-shaker from start to finish." Sullivan's summary of the Devil's role in Christian theology and literary history is "a slog," and his on-the-ground reporting in Mexico "amounts to one trip of a few days." Worse, in a book "whose purpose is to explore what evil is and why it exists across humankind," he focuses almost exclusively on Christian perspectives. Sullivan may have gone looking for the Devil, but despite the bold claim he makes, "he never seems to have met him, no matter where he looked."

The triple threat who dazzled on stage and screen

Janis Paige could do it all, in any medium. With more than 100 stage, TV, and film credits to her name, she could belt a song to the rafters, as in the original 1954 Broadway production of The Pajama Game, and crack wise with Bob Hope, in USO shows in Korea and Vietnam. She could also dance — even pairing up with Fred Astaire in "Stereophonic Sound," a particularly gymnastic number from 1957's film Silk Stockings that had the two leaping atop furniture and ultimately swinging from a chandelier. Astaire asked if she was up to it. "I said, 'Sure,'" she recalled in 2016, "not knowing if I was going to fall on my face or not. I didn't!" 

Born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Wash., Paige "was a gifted singer as a child," said the Los Angeles Times, performing in amateur shows by age 5, but she thought she'd go into opera. That all changed when she filled in for an absent singer at Los Angeles' Hollywood Canteen nightclub the night a film studio head's assistant was in attendance. She spent the 1940s "as one of the busiest actors in Jack Warner's stable," starring in more than a dozen movies. When her contract wasn't renewed she "became a star on her own terms" on Broadway. In The Pajama Game, "her greatest triumph," she earned raves as strong-willed union leader Babe Williams, said The Guardian. She missed out on the 1957 film version — the role went to her rival Doris Day. But she made a hilarious impression that year in Silk Stockings in a role spoofing swimming starlet Esther Williams, which she played by "periodically hitting the side of her head as if to get water out of her ears." 

By the 1970s, Paige had become "a television stalwart," said The Washington Post, taking recurring roles on All in the Family and General Hospital. She also maintained "an active cabaret career into her 90s." In 2017, in a rare moment of public vulnerability, she joined the ranks of the #MeToo movement, telling how, at 22, she was pressured by a director to go out with department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, who tried to rape her. She fought back, bit the hand that was trying to muzzle her screams, and ran away. "Even at 95, I remember everything," she wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. But "time is not on my side, and neither is silence."