The Last Movie Stars, on HBO Max

Even at the height of voyeuristic reality TV, nobody thought to make a Bobby & Whitney-style show about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Everyone considered them Hollywood’s classiest power couple, so they assumed they must be boring. However, their relationship had plenty of behind-the-scenes drama. Ethan Hawke never shies away from any of it during his six-part documentary profile of Woodward and Newman, The Last Movie Stars, which premieres tomorrow on HBO Max.

They first worked together on the Broadway production of Picnic and soon became an item. There was a slight complication though, given the fact Newman was already married—to somebody else. That obviously planted the seed for certain tensions, as the Newman’s daughters (from both marriages) eventually address.

Despite their mutual fame and frequent collaborations, the two were on different career trajectories, which contributed to the other major theme of Hawke’s docu-series. At first, Woodward was the bigger star, thanks to her Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve. Of course, Newman soon eclipsed her with Somebody Up There Likes Me and he only grew in popularity through his Tennessee Williams films.

To tell their story, Hawke had a wealth of primary sources to draw from. Newman had commissioned his screenwriter friend Stewart Stern to conduct interviews with all the major people in his life (including his first wife), when he had a notion of writing an autobiography (that Knopf bought at auction for good money). When Newman changed his mind, he burned the tapes, but the transcripts survived. Making a virtue of necessity, Hawke recruited many of his colleagues for dramatic readings of the transcribed interviews. Mostly, it works quite well. George Clooney and Laura Linney are excellent vocal sound-alikes for the star couple. Brooks Ashmanskas also sounds so perfectly insufferable as their pal Gore Vidal, it is almost spooky.

Hawke (who previously helmed the refined doc, Seymour: An Introduction) has a keen eye for selecting clips from the couple’s filmography that marry up well with the themes and events under discussion. Many of the scenes should prompt viewers to revisit the given films. All the really big one, like The Hustler and even Paris Blues (which both have classic jazz soundtracks) get their full just due. Yet, it is a bit frustrating we only see scenes of Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Altman’s Quintet to illustrate Newman’s periods of personal confusion and unrewarding professional choices.

Still, it is a little weird to hear Absence of Malice so casually dismissed. If anything, this should be the Sydney Pollack film’s moment, since we’re now in an era of fake news and journalistic scandals, like the Taylor Lorenz doxing incident. Newman himself dismisses The Towering Inferno as mere commercial fare, but from the perspective of 2022, it looks like a pretty hard-hitting expose of shoddy construction techniques.

Regardless, Hawke’s most conspicuous oversight is the complete absence of Newman’s notorious (from his point-of-view) televised nuclear freeze debate with Charlton Heston. By all accounts, Heston handed Newman his head and reportedly the liberal star never spoke to his conservative former friend afterward. Frankly, it was a major event in Newman’s life that would nicely fit with analysis of his box office bomb, WUSA (which everyone concedes was a failure). Indeed, Stuart Rosenberg’s yarn demonizing a right-wing radio station arguably reflects a lack of understanding of differing viewpoints that contributed to Newman’s humbling in the Heston debate.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, on HBO Max

Technically, these tapes weren’t lost, they were suppressed. The Soviet Union wanted to document their nuclear industry’s “finest hour” in the face of crisis, like NASA’s response to Apollo 13. However, when it became glaringly clear how ineffective, dishonest and counter-productive their crisis management was, to the powers-that-were (ultimately, that was Gorbachev), the Party reverted to censorship and propaganda to bury the truth. James Jones assembled the newly recovered footage into a vivid step-by-step chronicle of the nuclear disaster, as it really happened, in Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, which premieres tonight on HBO.

Right from the start, the authorities’ disregard for human life is shocking apparent. We watch unprotected families allowed to visit playgrounds the day after the core melt-down and massive release of radiation. Several times, Jones contrasts footage of the oblivious citizenry with the desperate crisis management underway at the reactor.

This pattern would continue after the incident, when the Communist Party basically declared an end to Chernobyl-related illness by fiat, mandating all physicians diagnose resulting radiation sickness as “Radiophobia.” Jones also discovered damning footage of the under-equipped reclamation teams, who were dispatched to clean and close-down the V.I. Lenin Power Station with insufficient warning of the risks they were running. Viewers can make that judgement, because we literally see their superiors sending them out with a few sheets of lead strapped to their torsos (like “cannon-fodder,” as one survivor puts it).

If anyone truly emerges as a villain in Lost Tapes, it would be Gorbachev, who lied to the world and to his people about the severity of the disaster, at great cost to Russian and Ukrainian lives. Far from the Soviet Nuclear bureaucracy’s “finest hour,” the incident almost blew up into a global catastrophe. Instead of slowing the reaction, an ill-conceived plan to drop sand on top of the reactor nearly caused it to collapse into earth beneath. There is a reason why the former General Secretary consistently polls so low in Russia.

The Flight Attendant (Pilot)

Just when flight attendants thought they had finally lived down the naughty fictionalized memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me, hard-partying Cassie Bowden comes along to give everyone the wrong idea again. However, she will regret her ways when she wakes up next to a dead body in creator Steve Yockey’s The Flight Attendant, based on Chris Bohjalian’s novel, which premieres this Thursday on HBO Max—with the pilot episode currently sneak-peaking on YouTube.

Bowden can be flaky, but her crewmates don’t mind. At least her work bestie Megan Briscoe keeps forgiving her—the others are starting to run out of patience. She really pushes it hooking-up with 1^st class passenger Alex Sokoluv mid-flight and then doubles-down on protocol violations by spending a wild night with him in Bangkok. Rather inconveniently, the fun comes to a screeching halt when he wakes up the next morning next to Sokoluv, whose throat has been cut.

Savvy enough to distrust the Thai justice system, Bowden does her best to tidy up after herself and sneak back to her hotel. She shortsightedly thinks she has made it once her flight lifts off, but then she starts having visions of Sokoluv guilt-tripping her for her disappearing act. Meanwhile, the body will be discovered.

Kaley Cuoco is definitely a spectacularly irresponsible mess as Bowden. It is terrific portrayal of shallow excess, but the character will have to start growing up, for us to spend four more episodes with her. Fortunately, getting mixed up with a murder can have that effect on a person.