Screen Test

                Gary Oldham is Jackson Lamb in "Slow Horses."  Apple TV+ photo via IMDb.com Picture Britain's greatest secret agent reimagined, not as James Bond but as a flatulent, foul-mouthed, whiskey-swilling slob under a lion's mane of unwashed hair in holey socks always propped among the cigarette butts on his desk. Meet Jackson Lamb. After spending a couple of weeks bingeing through four and a half seasons of “Slow Horses,” I find I've become a fanboy. I may have come to the party late, but I'm hardly alone in my fondness for Apple TV's brilliantly written, white-knuckle exciting, nauseatingly violent and genius-level hilarious spy thriller that gets a bunch of nominations whenever they hand out television awards. As magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman, Jackson Lamb actually sleeps in his permanently wrinkled shirt and tie on a dingy sofa in his dingy office. Whether asleep or awake – sometimes it's hard to tell – he farts a lot. Hy...

  Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.”   Warner Bros. Pictures photo via IMDb.com A few months after the provocative “Eddington” tried to find black humor in America's slippery slide toward fascism, iconic writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson mines the same sardonic vein in the action-packed “One Battle After Another.” Leonard DiCaprio stretches his Oscar-winning versatility into Cheech and Chong mode to play the film's antihero, Bob, who, it should be noted, goes through most of the film's nonstop chases, shootouts and road rages wearing a bathrobe.  Sixteen years earlier, his name was “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun. He and his honey, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), were political revolutionaries. Not the horned boogeymen we hear about in White House press briefings, but the real kind. Anti-capitalistic warriors, armed to the teeth with explosives and big honkin' machine guns. They liberated migrants from heavily guarded immigration holding facilities. They r...