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Clockwise from top: Backrooms, Euphoria, The Four Seasons, and Star City.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: A24, Netflix, Eddy Chen/HBO, Apple TV+
It’s nice to see you’ve chosen to leave the liminal space of streaming services, where endless scrolling holds you captive because you can’t decide what to watch. Let us be the salve. This weekend sees the release of Backrooms, a new A24 film from a 20-year-old director. It’ll seemingly follow Obsession as another low-budget horror to reach box-office heights. But if eerie horror isn’t your vibe, there are plenty other options.
From a 4chan thread, to YouTube, to the big screen, Backrooms is here. Director-writer Kane Parsons was inspired by the creepypasta image of a dim and fluorescently lit yellow room to craft this horror. He enlisted Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture-store owner who stumbles into an endless hidden liminal space of hallways and rooms and manically tries to convince his therapist (Renate Reinsve) of its existence.
➽ Read this after you see it: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
Over five seasons, For All Mankind has been one of the smartest, most thrilling series on TV, presenting an alternate history in which the Soviets made it to the moon first. This show runs it back, telling the same story from their perspective. It’s more of a paranoid spy thriller with the cosmonauts surveilled by their intelligence agency and accused of leaking information to the Americans. Rhys Ifans leads an ensemble cast. — Roxana Hadadi
➽ In theaters; read the full review.
In the wacky series’ first season, Pakistani American brothers Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) inherited a secret drug empire when their father died. In the second, they need somewhere to launder all their money, which brings them into casino owner Max Sugar’s (Fred Armisen) inner circle. —R.H.
Sometimes all a series needs is to take its famous actors on vacation. In the second season of Tina Fey’s comedy, Fey, Will Forte, and Colman Domingo reunite to honor their recently deceased friend Nick (Steve Carell) alongside his ex-wife (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and his pregnant girlfriend (Erika Henningsen).
Low key … can this be the series finale? We’ve broken the season down:
➽ Building that wedding from hell.
➽ Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje had to break bad.
➽ Priscilla Delgado was afraid of throwing shoes at Zendaya.
➽ Darrell Britt-Gibson “studied samurai for it, Buddhist monks.”
➽ Will it win Emmys? “This is a town chasing cool.”
➽ This week also sees the series finale of Hacks. Was it all a death dream?
Brat summer was a moment, but The Moment is Charli XCX’s attempt to skewer, examine, and completely flip that era of her life into something for the big screen. Presented as a documentary — her music-video collaborator Aidan Zamiri directs — this drama finds Charli right before she launches her Brat arena tour and is beholden to the label’s demands, like employing the eccentric and overbearing director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård) to director her concert film.
➽ Plus if you missed it on Hulu, Timothée Chalamet’s turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown has rolled onto HBO Max.
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