Portside

In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless, but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie.

In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard Bernstein but leaves out the complicating — and fascinating — real-life details for a more streamlined, tearjerking product. It’ll doubtlessly do well at the Oscars.

Netflix’s resident horror auteur is back with his take on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. You’ll have a good time — even if some of the nods to “sociopolitical relevance” might send your eyes rolling.

The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.

In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It's approaching a Coen brothers level of satiric genius.

Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization.

The new Oprah Winfrey–produced Sidney Poitier documentary, Sidney, is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait of a human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many strengths.

With a solid premise about working-class vampire hunters, Day Shift had real potential — but there’s no escaping the Netflix curse.

Critics are fawning over Good Luck to You, Leo Grande for its “brave” sex positivity. But the crowd-pleasing comedy is actually anxiously prescriptive, and it relies on an angelic and selfless sex worker to teach a middle-aged woman how to love her body.

David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future, is a return to the “body horror” genre. It brings back the gross-out gore that first made his career in the 1970s — but without the thrills.