“Loving,” about a landmark civil rights case involving interracial marriage and starring an Oscar-nominated Ruth Negga, comes to HBO. And Peter Capaldi ends his run as Doctor Who — at least until Christmas.
What’s on TV
LOVING (2016) 8 p.m. on HBO. Ruth Negga portrays Mildred Loving, and Joel Edgerton is her husband, Richard, in Jeff Nichols’s fictionalized account of the interracial couple whose battle for the right to have their marriage recognized in 1950s Virginia went to the Supreme Court. Ms. Negga’s performance is “a revelation,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, noting the startling effect of the film’s “insistent, quotidian quiet” as it imagines the historical figures “as they once were, when they were people instead of monuments to American exceptionalism.” She added: “It was, the movie insists, the absolute ordinariness of their love that defined them, and that made the fight for it into an indelible story of this country.”’
DOCTOR WHO 8:30 p.m. on BBC America. Peter Capaldi’s run as the Twelfth Doctor, and Stephen Moffat’s as this series’s showrunner, comes to an end. But word has it that the Time Lord’s transformation won’t fully take place — and the Thirteenth Doctor revealed — until the Christmas Special. Chris Chibnall of “Broadchurch” fame will succeed Mr. Moffat.
What’s Streaming
HAMISH MACBETH on Acorn TV. Around the time he was breaking out in films like “Trainspotting” and “The Full Monty,” Robert Carlyle starred in this mid-90s series, spun from the M. C. Beaton mysteries about a complacent police constable who patrols Lochdubh, a village in the Scottish Highlands, with his adorable canine partner, Wee Jock. Make it a Beaton double bill with “AGATHA RAISIN,” starring Ashley Jensen (“Catastrophe”) as an obnoxious, high-powered publicist who trades the glamour of London for a cottage in the Cotswolds, where she is transformed into a thoroughly modern Miss Marple.
A BIGGER SPLASH (2016) on iTunes. Marianne (a near-silent Tilda Swinton), a rock star recuperating from throat surgery, and her lover, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), find their reverie on a volcanic island in the Strait of Sicily interrupted when her former beau, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), unexpectedly roar in. Harry is on a desperate mission, and soon Marianne and Paul’s bliss has been rather violently commandeered by wandering glances and furtive caresses. The Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who last leveled his gaze on Ms. Swinton in “I Am Love” (2009), has loosely adapted Jacques Deray’s 1969 New Wave thriller “La Piscine,” and added magnificent digs and a soundtrack throbbing with the Rolling Stones, Harry Nilsson, Verdi and 1970s Brazilian classics. “Mr. Guadagnino excels at creating lifestyle pornography of an especially rarefied kind, although in classic European style, he gilds the pleasure with some political guilt,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times.
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