Angelina Jolie’s war drama arrives on Netflix. And HBO’s “Room 104” tells disturbing tales within the confines of four walls.
What’s Streaming
FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER (2017) on Netflix. Angelina Jolie’s latest venture into war movies comes with this adaptation of a best-selling memoir by the Cambodian author and activist Loung Ung. Directed and co-written by Ms. Jolie, the film captures life under the genocidal Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978 through the eyes of Ms. Ung, who, after being separated from her middle-class family at age 5, was forced to work for the militant group and fight for survival. In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Jolie shared how her first visit to Cambodia inspired her to see life, and her career, in a different light. “Once you get exposed to what’s really happening in the world, and other people’s realities, you just can’t ever not know,” she said. “You can’t ever wake up and pretend it’s not happening.”
AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981) on iTunes and Amazon. A backpacking trip through the moors in Britain goes horribly wrong when a wolflike creature mauls the American students Jack (Griffin Dunne) and David (David Naughton) in this comedy-horror classic. After the attack, a ghastly Jack joins the undead but regularly visits his hospitalized friend, who is doomed to become a werewolf. Jack warns David of his fate and urges him to kill himself before he inflicts any harm, but David ignores his pleas and lives in frantic anticipation of a full moon.
GOOD BEHAVIOR on iTunes, Amazon and Hulu. There’s not much good behavior in this suspenseful drama series. Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey”) plays Letty, a seductive thief and con artist who struggles to put her demons behind her. While robbing a hotel room, she meets an attractive contract killer, Javier (Juan Diego Botto), setting off a steamy relationship fueled by their criminal addictions. “You may not buy ‘Good Behavior,’” Mike Hale wrote in The Times, “but you might not have a bad time watching it.” Catch up with Season 1 before the show returns on Oct. 15.
SKIMM’D WITH on Watch. Chelsea Handler and Shannon Doherty discuss health care in this new series, in which celebrities break down a timely news topic in less than five minutes — from a bathtub.
What’s on TV
ROOM 104 11:30 p.m. on HBO; also on HBO streaming platforms. This dark anthology series, created by the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (“Togetherness”), revolves around the transient characters who pass through a single motel room. “The approach is liberating,” James Poniewozik wrote in The Times. “Peak TV has given us glorious narrative mansions with many rooms. But sometimes it’s a relief when a series tells you that you can check out any time you’d like.” This episode takes place in 1969, when the sole survivor of a plane crash (Amy Landecker) checks into the room but is unsure whether she wants to return to the life she knows or embark on a new journey.
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