Cold War thrills and buddy-comedy hijinks collide in this clever new feature co-starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Reynolds plays a U.S. pilot forced to eject from his SR-71 Blackbird during a botched 1987 reconnaissance mission. Landing somewhere in the USSR’s boreal forest, he’s rescued by Branagh’s character, a gruff former KGB agent who saves his life. Luckily, the ex-spy is an American culture buff and, sensing an opportunity to defect, agrees to help his new friend escape the country. Reynolds and Branagh’s chemistry complements some top-notch action scenes.
Friday, Sept. 4, Apple TV

by Gil Durán

“Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship,” said Kevin Truong in The San Francisco Standard. The premise, undoubtedly, “would make for a good political thriller.” In Gil Durán’s new nonfiction hit, it makes for more unsettling reading. Durán, a journalist who’s also been a spokesman for Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, argues that tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the main patron of JD Vance’s career, sits at the center of an active and powerful circle of tech evangelists who believe democracy is obsolete, technology will create a utopian future, and their cohort is an elite that should decide how the future unfolds. The claim would sound like mere conspiracy theory, said Tonya Mosley in NPR.org, except that the players Durán identifies “have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.”

“You could not ask for a more hair-raising compendium of the insane things that Silicon Valley moguls have advocated for,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has touted as formative to his beliefs a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, that arguably predicted the rise of cryptocurrency and AI while also forecasting the collapse of nation-states and emergence of individuals smart and powerful enough to pursue their ambitions without constraint. Thiel can count Elon Musk and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen among his allies, and all appear to have been influenced by alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates putting the U.S. under the rule of a CEO-style monarch and has talked about the need to develop “a humane alternative to genocide” to address Earth’s supposed excess of unproductive individuals. While Durán “gives perhaps too much credence to the viability of Silicon Valley’s most authoritarian dreams,” his book is a “much-needed” wake-up call, warning us that today’s tech giants should be feared, not blindly worshipped.

Durán claims that tech moguls view the Trump regime as a vehicle for the expansion of their power, and “few could dispute this,” said Steve Rose in The Guardian. Remember the many tech titans standing behind him at his 2025 inauguration? Or how they helped the Trump family make billions off cryptocurrency? The payoffs have come in government contracts such as Palantir’s estimated $13.7 billion annual haul as well as in the wrecking ball taken to government oversight. Trump has even backed such nutty ideas as building 10 “Freedom Cities” that would be exempt from many existing regulations. Thiel and his allies haven’t fully triumphed yet, though, as indicated by the recent surge in public opposition to data centers. With any luck, “this could be a radicalizing moment.”

The Donna Reed daughter who married Coach

Shelley Fabares radiated an onscreen wholesomeness at every age. She played perky eldest daughter Mary Stone on the squeaky-clean Donna Reed Show from 1958 to 1966. She then stepped into a bikini and shimmied her way through three Elvis movies; graduated to the role of supportive young wife in 1971’s Brian’s Song, an Emmy-winning TV movie about interracial friendship in football; and sparkled as the selfassured TV news anchor who eventually weds Craig T. Nelson’s character in the 1989–1997 sitcom Coach. She took pride in most of her roles: “The Donna Reed Show changed my life forever,” she said in 1989. “The Elvis movies, just great.” But she was forever mystified by her brief musical success, when her recording of the pop ballad “Johnny Angel” hit No. 1 for two weeks in 1962. “I was stunned about that, to put it mildly,” she said. “I literally cannot sing. So there’s a lot of overdubbing.”

Michele Ann Marie Fabares was born into a middle-class family in Santa Monica, Calif. Her aunt, Nanette Fabray, was a successful actress, and Shelley “worked as a child actor from her earliest years,” said The Wrap. By age 9, she appeared on an NBC special that featured Frank Sinatra serenading her with “Young at Heart.” At 14, she “achieved generational fame” through The Donna Reed Show, spending seven years with the ABC sitcom as America watched her grow up. In an easy transition to young-adult roles, she appeared opposite Elvis in 1965’s Girl Happy, 1966’s Spinout, and 1967’s Clambake. Then she “returned to television,” where she was most at home, said The New York Times. In the 1970s and ’80s, she was a series regular on One Day at a Time, playing the business rival of star Bonnie Franklin. (At one point Fabares’ aunt made an appearance as her character’s mother.) And she “entertained yet another generation” on Coach, receiving two Emmy nominations. 

During her later years, Fabares devoted herself to liberal activism and philanthropic causes, said Entertainment Weekly. Along with her second husband, the actor Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H, she lobbied Congress to fund research into Alzheimer’s disease, which had afflicted her mother. Even while battling autoimmune hepatitis, for which she received a liver transplant in 2000, she remained active on the board of the Screen Actors Guild. “That I kept on working was just an astonishing fact to me,” she said in 2024. “I felt so lucky.”