What’s on TV
THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. The singing competition returns for its 17th season with Taylor Swift set to reprise her role as “mega mentor” to the contestants who make it to the show’s Knockout Rounds. She appeared previously on “The Voice” in this capacity in 2014. Swift will dispense her wisdom to those singers who are chosen by Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, Blake Shelton and returning judge and coach Gwen Stefani. In the season premiere, the contestants will endure blind auditions, in which the four judges will begin each performance facing away from the stage, only seeing the person they’re listening to if they choose to serve as their coach. Through this process, each of the judges will accrue a team of contestants they’ll then shepherd through to the next stage of the competition.
What’s Streaming
MYSTIC RIVER (2003) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Clint Eastwood’s mystery film follows three estranged childhood friends, Jimmy, Sean and Dave, who are brought back together by the murder of Jimmy’s daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum). Dave (Tim Robbins) saw Katie the night she was killed and returned to his wife, later that evening, covered in blood. Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a detective, is charged with finding the perpetrator. But Jimmy (Sean Penn), who has criminal connections, insists on conducting his own vigilante investigation. The events of the present are shadowed throughout the film by the brutal sexual abuse Dave experienced at the hands of two men who abducted him from a childhood street hockey game. Eventually that past crime rears its ugly head with tragic consequences.
SECRETARY (2002) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Viewers will have to decide how well the sexual politics of this unconventional romantic comedy have aged since the turn of the millennium. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee, a troubled young woman who finds work as a secretary to a temperamental attorney, E. Edward Grey (James Spader). His demanding personality and her obedient one gel and their dynamic quickly becomes sexual. In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden called the film “a small groundbreaking comedy” and said that its characterization of Lee isn’t derisive. “Lee may be shown crawling around the floor with an envelope in her teeth, but the movie still insists on seeing her as a plucky heroine plotting her own sexual emancipation.”
OCÉANS (2010) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This documentary by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud explores the Earth’s largest bodies of water, which cover around 70 percent of the planet’s surface and contain roughly 97 percent of its liquid H2O. The film, narrated in English by Pierce Brosnan, approaches its gargantuan subject in several ways, showcasing its role as a home to many different ecosystems that each support a variety of plant and animal species. It also takes a wider look at the relationship between our oceans and the larger global environment as well as the ways in which humans interact with this major feature of their world.
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