George Clooney and Brad Pitt may be getting up there in age, but they can still pull off an entertaining caper. The duo, who’ve previously teamed up in Burn After Reading and the Oceans franchise, easily carry this slight action feature, playing two lone-wolf fixers accidentally brought in at the same time to clean up a mess: a dead body in a district attorney’s hotel room. A messy job gets messier when the cadaver turns out to have a pulse, as well as 4 kilos of heroin. Friday, Sept. 27, Apple TV+.

by Elizabeth Strout 

“The lives of ordinary people in ordinary places are Elizabeth Strout’s specialty,” said Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist has spent a quarter century developing “a grippingly cohesive fictional landscape that gets richer with every book,” and her latest best-seller finally unites two of her most beloved characters. Olive Kitteridge, the cantankerous heroine of Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer winner, learns that fiction writer Lucy Barton, the central figure in four recent Strout novels, has moved into the coastal Maine town where Olive was once a schoolteacher, and the crusty local invites the younger woman to hear a family story she wishes to share. “So far this is reassuringly familiar territory to fans of Strout’s fiction. And then it all becomes subtly strange,” as Strout interweaves her usual “tales of ordinarily damaged families” with a murder mystery.

“Tell Me Everything is an anomaly in Strout’s fiction,” and not just because of its lurid murder plot, said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. Its narrative voice, “by turns magisterial and intimate,” is “unlike any other in Strout’s fiction.” And Strout creates “beguiling misdirection” by having the narrator pronounce early on that the novel’s central figure will be lawyer Bob Burgess, another familiar Strout character, now 65, who is in the habit of taking long, romantically charged walks with Lucy. “In fact, Tell Me Everything is not Bob’s or any one person’s story; that is, indeed, the point.” Bob features in the murder plot because he decides to defend a local hermit accused of killing his mother. But that’s just one thread in a book that “brings together Strout’s most indelible characters in a rich tapestry, intricately wrought yet effortlessly realized.” 

A “compassionate if rather gimmicky” novel, Tell Me Everything “makes clear that everybody has a story,” said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. Its events unfold across one year, and “sometimes, it feels like an awfully long year. There is so much going on, so many sagas,” some of which tilt toward soap opera and others of which “verge on the incomprehensible.” Still, “Strout’s limpid, clear voice shows great love for her characters, even the tragic ones—maybe especially the tragic ones,” said Laurie Hertzel in the San Francisco Chronicle. “She shows no judgment, just enormous empathy for the lives people live.” In the world she has built, every person matters, and “those of us with unrecorded lives can only hope for someone as compassionate as Strout to scoop up our stories and tell them.”

The thunder-voiced actor who commanded the screen

James Earl Jones’ voice reverberated through six decades of stage and screen history. That rich, resonant, and instantly recognizable basso profundo elevated every line he delivered, whether in a Shakespearean tragedy or a Disney blockbuster. It exuded regal sagacity in his role as Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) and, through the filter of scuba gear, unfathomable menace as the planet-vaporizing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise. It announced to cable TV viewers, “This is CNN.” And combined with his imposing, solemn physicality, it lent gravitas and majesty to roles as kings, generals, coal miners, and garbagemen. But Jones never took himself too seriously. On a road trip, he confessed in a 2014 interview, he once broke out into his Darth Vader voice over his CB radio. “I had to stop doing that,” he said. “The truck drivers would really freak out.” 

Though he had “one of the most famous voices in cinema,” he started out as a child traumatized into silence, said The Wall Street Journal. He was born in Arkabutla, Miss., to a father—actor and prizefighter Robert Earl Jones—who’d abandoned the family and an unstable mother who left to become a migrant worker. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who headed north to Michigan as part of the Great Migration. The upheaval gave him a stutter, and mockery from other children rendered him “virtually mute” from ages 6 to 14, he later said. A high school teacher helped him realize that reciting memorized words made speaking easier, and by his senior year he had won an oratory competition and a scholarship to the University of Michigan. After graduation and military service, he reunited with his father in New York City in 1955 and “scratched a living” as an actor for years, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). His appearance in a 1962 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick, who gave him a small part in Dr. Strangelove. But his breakout wouldn’t come until he was 37, when he gave a Tony-winning performance as a boxer battling racism in the 1967 play The Great White Hope and was “hailed as the most exciting presence in the American theater since Marlon Brando.” He reprised the role in the 1970 film and received his only Oscar nomination. 

Over the next two decades, “Jones was in constant demand,” said The New York Times, appearing in films as varied as the romantic comedy Claudine (1974), the coal drama Matewan (1987), and the sports fantasy Field of Dreams (1989). Yet for being the voice of Darth Vader—the role that launched him into the pop culture stratosphere—Jones was paid only $7,000, and he initially asked not to be credited, characterizing his contribution as mere “special effects.” While Vader “didn’t exactly represent cinema’s most loving father,” said Rolling Stone, “paternal roles would become the linchpin of Jones’ work.” He played solemn royal patriarchs in The Lion King and in an acclaimed Shakespeare in the Park production of King Lear, as well as a goofy African monarch in the Eddie Murphy vehicles Coming to America (1998) and Coming 2 America (2021). 

Yet “Jones was happiest onstage,” said The Washington Post. If his resume was “thick with commercials and phone-it-in movies,” that was to subsidize his relatively low-paid theater work. On Broadway he could afford to be more daring, playing Paul Robeson in a well-received one-man show and earning another Tony for his gut wrenching portrayal of a stern father in August Wilson’s Fences (1987). Jones “continued a punishing schedule of stage acting into his 80s,” said the Los Angeles Times, even as lung problems forced him to use an oxygen tank between acts. He refused to consider resting on his laurels. “The secret is never forgetting that you’re a journeyman actor,” he said in 2014, “and that nothing is your final thing, nothing is your greatest thing, nothing is your worst thing.”