Sorkin Indicts Facebook, Other Mommy Haunts the Weekend

The rest of the slate is global and a bit scattered. Bollywood's Drishyam: The Conclusion closes out the family-secret thriller series, with Vijay Salgaonkar's buried past resurfacing as fresh evidence reopens the investigation. The animal-attack movie Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon sends a medical mission into the jungle to meet a colossal ancient predator, and it's rated the lowest of the lot, so it's strictly for people who already know why they'd want it. And if last week's true-crime appetite is still alive, Unabomber follows Ted Kaczynski from Harvard prodigy to the manhunt that ended it.

I pulled TMDB's list of what's airing right now, and it is a monument to television's two permanent modes. Talk shows and soaps. Late-night, daytime, a Dutch soap that has run since 1990, and a long line of procedurals. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not where the conversation is. The two series on the list that I'd actually point you at are the prestige pair.

MobLand is the big crime drama of the moment, built on a simple and brutal idea: two mob families clash in a war that threatens to take everyone down with it. And Slow Horses remains the most reliably fun spy show around, a dysfunctional team of MI5 rejects led by the gloriously foul Jackson Lamb. It currently holds an 8.0 on TMDB. If you've never started it, the episodes are short and the pleasure is immediate. For something familiar, Grey's Anatomy is still airing too, now old enough that some of its viewers were born after the pilot.

The next two Fridays are heavy. On October 16, Disney opens Whalefall in around 3,000 locations. It's the one I'm genuinely curious about: a man dives off the California coast looking for his late father's remains and gets swallowed by a sperm whale, with one hour of air to figure out the way out. That's a movie that either works as a pressure-cooker or collapses into a very expensive joke. The same day brings the video-game fighter Street Fighter, set in 1993 as Ryu and Ken are pulled into a tournament by the mysterious Chun-Li, and You Can See Everything.

October 17 through 21, Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away returns to theaters for its 25th anniversary. If you've only watched it on a laptop, this is your correction. The weekend after, Wicker is listed for October 21, with Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage and Alexander Skarsgård in a story about a woman who commissions a basket maker to weave her a husband, the animated fantasy Wildwood opens, and on October 23 DC's Clayface follows a rising Gotham movie star whose miracle treatment fixes his face and breaks something else. One box office tracker is already pencilling in around $20 million for it. Then October 30 brings The Mongoose, where a falsely accused war hero leads police on a televised cross-country car chase while the public roots for him. It's already one of the most-watched upcoming titles in our database, so somebody out there is excited.

The r/movies megathread this week was The Social Reckoning and Other Mommy, with the usual throwbacks bundled in. The board also lit up for a James McAvoy AMA scheduled for Friday morning, a reminder of what a ridiculous range he has between Split and Atonement.

The business stories were bigger than the movies. The sheer size of David Zaslav's reported payout from the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger had both subreddits doing arithmetic out loud, and a Paramount adaptation of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 was announced as in the works. Over on r/boxoffice, DC Studios' early development slate for the Brave and the Bold, Teen Titans, Swamp Thing and Wonder Woman got people dreaming and doubting at once, and there was a nervous thread about whether Disney is quietly burying Hexed before its November release.

The sweetest pieces were about older films. Guillermo del Toro said more than 1,300 artists helped turn Pan's Labyrinth into a 3D theatrical experience, The Departed turned 20, and a new poster for Ken Russell's The Devils made the rounds. A thread asking which film had no right being as good as it was became a long, happy argument that also pulled in Zodiac. If you'd rather skip the discourse, our Discover tool will hand you something in about ten seconds, no comment section required.

If you want to be part of the weekend, see Other Mommy in a full theater, because horror needs a room. If you want to be impressed, see The Social Reckoning. If you want to stay in, watch Doing Life or finally start Slow Horses. And next Friday, a man in a whale's stomach gets his turn.