What’s on TV Thursday: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and ‘Wu Assassins’

What’s on TV

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013) 7:40 p.m. and 11:20 p.m. on FXM. Audiences will have to wait until the New York Film Festival opens in September to see “The Irishman,” Martin Scorsese’s much-hyped return to the gangster crime genre. For now, they can revisit this movie, the director’s lampooning of white-collar crime. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the real-life former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, seen here as the yacht-riding, wine-gulping figurehead of a brokerage firm whose lifestyle is fueled by fraud. Along with a partner played by Jonah Hill, he rides a roller coaster of bad form that culminates in a Quaalude-impaired Lamborghini ride. “From its opening sequence — a quick, nasty, unapologetic tour through its main character’s vices and compulsions, during which he crash-lands a helicopter on the grounds of his Long Island estate and (not simultaneously) shares cocaine with a call girl in an anatomically creative manner — to its raw, chaotic finish, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ hums with vulgar, voyeuristic energy,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess,” he added, “but it is never less than wide-awake.”

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) 10:45 p.m. on Showtime. A similar kind of addled excess (and, perhaps, fetishization of bad behavior) can be found in this movie, Terry Gilliam’s take on Hunter S. Thompson’s formative book of gonzo journalism. Johnny Depp stars opposite Benicio Del Toro in a hallucinatory spree through Sin City. Like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” its drugged-out sequences can inspire laugher and nausea in equal measure.

What’s Streaming

WU ASSASSINS Stream on Netflix. San Francisco’s Chinatown becomes a martial arts battleground in this new series, which mixes a healthy dose of science fiction into its swinging and kicking. The plot centers on Kai (played by the Indonesian martial arts movie stalwart Iko Uwais), a San Francisco chef who gets bestowed with mystical powers and a mission to save the world from super-criminals. The first episode sees Kai going from slinging shrimp out of a food truck to dodging a baseball bat in the space of about two and a half minutes.

BELOVED (1998) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The eminent novelist Toni Morrison, who died this week at 88, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel “Beloved.” In this adaptation of that post-Civil War story, Oprah Winfrey plays Sethe, a former slave, opposite Danny Glover as Paul D, another former slave who is Sethe’s friend and eventual lover. The adaptation was directed by Jonathan Demme, who “succeeds uncannily well in bringing the novel’s pulse to the screen,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times. “Though this ‘Beloved’ begins slowly and sometimes reveals its earthbound side,” she added, “it accelerates into a gripping, wildly imaginative film that’s not quite like any other.”

Gabe Cohn writes about television, fine art, film and other topics related to culture and the arts. He joined The Times in 2017.

Source: Read Full Article