Ask for “a recent samurai movie like 13 Assassins” and you’ll get a pile of recommendations that share a costume and nothing else. Everyone points you at the streaming series. Most of them miss. The problem is that the request is usually about structure, not setting. What people remember from Miike’s film isn’t the swords. It’s the assembly. Somebody decides a man has to die, somebody else goes around collecting the people who will do it, and then those people walk into a village they know they won’t walk out of.

“The book was better” is the laziest line in criticism. Nine times out of ten it means the reader got there first and resents the recasting. The face in your head was wrong, so the film is wrong. Fine. But there’s a harder version of the claim, and it’s the interesting one. Not the case where a bad film ruins a good book. The case where the film is genuinely good, respected, still watched, and the book still wins by a distance.

About ninety minutes in I checked how much was left. That’s the honest version of this review. The rest is me trying to work out why, because the idea underneath this film is good enough that it should have worked. Here’s the idea. Robin Hood was never the man in the ballads. He robbed and he killed and he was very good at it, and then he lived long enough to hear children sing songs about a version of himself that never existed.

IMAX Corporation (NYSE: IMAX) has notched its biggest global opening weekend ever, pulling in $52 million alongside Universal Pictures’ release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The film marks the first theatrical release ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras, and IMAX captured a striking 20% share of the movie’s worldwide debut. Nolan’s mythic action epic, built around a next-generation IMAX film camera and a new sync-sound system developed specifically for the shoot, broke a long list of company records on its way around the globe:

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale arrived on Netflix in March, and its renewed audience activity this spring suggests the platform’s subscribers are finding it now, months after the theatrical run closed. That is an appropriate fate for a franchise that always played the long game. The film earned 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — the highest critical score across the three Downton features — against a $50 million budget and $103 million at the worldwide box office.

Netflix has cancelled Bandi, the French-language crime drama set in Martinique, after a single eight-episode season. The confirmation came via a statement to local Caribbean radio station RCI, issued quietly on Thursday — no press release, no announcement on the platform itself. The show debuted on April 9. It lasted exactly one month before the axe came down. The economics Netflix cited are the standard formula: viewership results insufficient relative to production costs.

There is a specific kind of pain that comes from watching intelligent television collapse into stupidity in real time. Marshals is not that. Marshals never had the altitude to fall from. It arrived stupid, stayed stupid, and will presumably be renewed for a second season of stupidity, because nine and a half million people tuned in for the premiere and the CBS machine does not ask whether those viewers enjoyed themselves.

The first season of Citadel cost $300 million and scored 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Both of those numbers matter. The budget figure established Prime Video’s ambition. The critical reception established how badly that ambition was misfired. Reviewers consistently identified the same problem: the show spent so much energy building a universe that it forgot to give audiences characters or stories worth investing in. The spinoffs — Citadel: Honey Bunny from India, Citadel: Diana from Italy — have both been cancelled after single seasons.

The Yellowstone franchise has been expanding in every direction simultaneously — prequels in 1883 and 1923, a Kayce Dutton procedural in Marshals, the Pfeiffer-led Madison reconfigured as a standalone. None of them have replicated the original’s combination of melodrama, landscape, and moral pressure. Dutton Ranch, premiering May 15 on Paramount+, may be the closest anyone gets to a genuine continuation. Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler are in South Texas now. They are building something of their own, away from the wreckage of the Montana saga, and running into a rival ranch operation backed by Ed Harris and Annette Bening.

Elizabeth Strout has spent most of her career working the same geographical and emotional territory — the coast of Maine, the quiet devastations of marriage and childhood, the specific heaviness of the things people do not say. Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Oh William — each book deepened and extended an artistic project that has become one of the most sustained and coherent in contemporary American fiction. The Things We Never Say, publishing May 5, departs from the Maineverse she has inhabited for decades.