What’s on TV Wednesday: ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ and ‘Amazing Monkeys’

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Animals rule the screen, with visits to fictional menageries in “The Zookeeper’s Wife” and “Postcards From the Zoo,” and real ones in “Amazing Monkeys” and “Great Yellowstone Thaw.”

What’s Streaming

THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE (2017) on iTunes and Amazon. Jessica Chastain stars as Antonina Zabinska, who with her husband, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh), runs the Warsaw Zoo and saves some 300 Jews from the city’s ghetto during World War II. The plan: Turn the zoo into a hog farm to feed German soldiers, while smuggling Jews through a secret tunnel and into the basement of their family home. The director, Niki Caro, handsomely adapted Diane Ackerman’s 2007 nonfiction best seller, but the suffering of fugitives feels tame as the film avoids graphic depictions of Nazi barbarism, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife,’ with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.”

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POSTCARDS FROM THE ZOO (2012) on Mubi. A 3-year-old girl (Klarysa Aurelia Raditya) abandoned by her father at the Ragunan Zoo, a 350-acre wildlife park in South Jakarta, is taken under the wing of a giraffe trainer in this dreamy fable with a dark undercurrent from the Indonesian director Edwin. Then one day a magician (Nicholas Saputra) arrives and the girl (Ladya Cheryl), now grown, decides it is time to leave and become his assistant. And soon they find themselves inside a nearby brothel with a gangster.

2017 RED BULL YOUTH AMERICA’S CUP 1 p.m. on Red Bull TV. In Wednesday’s finals, young sailors, ages 18 to 24, race catamarans around the Great Sound in Bermuda, following the same course as the professional America’s Cup teams.

What’s on TV

ROYAL ASCOT 8:30 a.m. on NBCSN. Live coverage of the Royal Meeting at Ascot Racecourse — the high point of the British social season — runs through Saturday, featuring five American trainers with 14 horses competing in 30 races. Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh lead the daily royal procession into the festivities.

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AMAZING MONKEYS 8 p.m. on Smithsonian. The biologist Patrick Aryee continues his swing through the primate family tree in Africa, where the creatures that first arose in Asia became bigger, smarter and stronger — like the giant gelada baboon from the foothills of the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia and, from Uganda, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the latter of which shares 98 percent of its DNA with humans.

GREAT YELLOWSTONE THAW 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, ventures into Yellowstone National Park, whose inhabitants are coping with climate change — among them, beavers building higher dams with rising water levels, grizzly bears and wolves competing for food, and overheated baby owls fleeing the nest.

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