The extraordinary adventure of Flaco the Owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February, 2023, is recounted in fanatical detail in Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” The story is essentially crowdsourced, composed largely of footage and photos shot by dozens of devoted owlers who tracked the bird’s tenuous début on the loose, his steep learning curve as he started hunting in the park, his new life as a celebrity, and his perilous journeys through Manhattan. Lane fills out the tale with wide-ranging interviews, done on location, with enthusiasts and scientists; the result is an invigorating philosophical exploration of animal life, a vision of the modern media spotlight, and a symphonic outpouring of the energy, passion, and knowledge that make the city run.—Richard Brody (Screening July 29 in Central Park; opening July 31 at IFC Center.)
Off Broadway
Jennifer Nettles’s new musical, “Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo”—based on the legend of the eponymous seventeenth-century Sicilian apothecary (played by Nettles) who dispatches her abusive husband and supplies other women with the means to escape their own unhappy marriages—is ambitious and intermittently captivating. Sumptuous staging, by Mary Zimmerman, evokes the brooding chiaroscuro of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, while Didi Romero relishes every commedia dell’arte lazzo as the big-haired Duchessa. Musically, the show straddles the styles of “Hamilton” hip-hop and the fatally thesis-driven “Suffs.” Vitoria (Naomi Serrano), Giulia’s daughter, disapproves of her mother’s actions, but her motivations are tidied away by the end, with a resolution of sub-“Sweeney Todd” vengeance.—R.F. (PAC NYC; through Aug. 2.)
Pick Three
Sarah Larson on the summer’s best podcasts.
%2520copy.jpg)
Richard Oakes.Photograph by Bob Kreisel / Alamy
1. “Dan Taberski’s Manifesto” argues that, done right, a manifesto is a nonviolent call to action, an “artful scream”—and, perhaps, just what we need right now. Taberski (“Missing Richard Simmons”) studies significant cris de cœur—by such figures as Luigi Mangione, the late Mohawk activist Richard Oakes, and the punk musician Kathleen Hanna—and develops theories about how to compose a good one. It’s a refreshing response to a cultural moment that has many of us, as Taberski says of himself, “seething underneath, all the time.”
2. I wasn’t expecting “OnlyFantasy,” a series about the OnlyFans adult-content phenomenon, to be quite so moving and revelatory. Leon Neyfakh, the veteran journalist-podcaster, and Gracie Canaan, an insightful comedian and an OnlyFans creator herself, co-host, sensitively interviewing fans, creators, and behind-the-scenes workers to understand the psychology of OnlyFans intimacy. Much of the fantasy, we discover, is emotional, and we can hear it in the vulnerability of interviewees’ voices.
3. “The Gaza Chef,” from the German newspaper Die Zeit and its personable investigative journalist Yassin Musharbash, tells the story of Mahmoud Almadhoun, a young Palestinian cook who ran a soup kitchen in the Gaza Strip, and was killed by an Israeli projectile, in 2024. Almadhoun had been a reporting source of Musharbash’s; when Musharbash learns of Almadhoun’s death, he launches an extraordinary remote investigation into what happened and why. The results feel vivid and immediate, revealing much about survival efforts in Gaza and raising unnerving questions about modern warfare, including the use of A.I.
