New this week: Camila Cabello, Tony Hawk and 'Tokyo Vice'
This week’s new entertainment releases include Camila Cabello's third album, a documentary about the life of professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, and Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe starring in “Tokyo Vice,” a HBO Max crime drama
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Your support makes all the difference.Here’s a collection curated by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists of what’s arriving on TV, streaming services and music platforms this week.
MOVIES
— Tony Hawk may not have seemed the most obvious Academy Awards presenter but he does have a new movie coming out. “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off," a documentary about the professional skateboarder's life, debuts Tuesday on HBO Max and on HBO. It's directed by Sam Jones, who made the 2002 Wilco doc “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," and it spans the entire career of the 53-year-old skateboarding pioneer while attempting to grasp his still strong obsession to be as good as ever. “Tony is competing against Tony," says fellow skateboarder Lance Mountain in the film. "He’s always been competing against Tony.”
— Andrea Arnold, the British director of “American Honey” and “Fish Tank,” is among the most vibrant filmmakers working today. In “Cow,” which debuts in theaters and on digital rental Friday, she makes her first documentary with an unlikely star: Luma, a dairy cow on a southern England farm. Arnold filmed “Cow” over four years, capturing the quotidian rhythms of Luma's life, giving the bovine the kind attention and empathy she would for any human protagonist. Along with films like 2021's “Gunda,” a black-and-white documentary portrait of a pig, “Cow” is part of a recent surge to use cinema to capture and elevate the lives of animals seldom afforded a close-up.
— Filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who made the Oscar-winning “Free Solo” and last year's non-fiction standout “The Rescue,” this time set their sights even higher in “Return to Space.” The documentary, which premieres Friday on Netflix, is about Elon Musk's SpaceX and its attempts to transform space travel.
— AP Film Writer Jake Coyle
MUSIC
— Camila Cabello, last year's Cinderella, is all about music magic this week. She drops her third studio album, “Familia,” on Friday, April 8. The three-time Grammy nominee has already offered a glimpse of the upcoming music by reteaming with Ed Sheeran for the salsa-inflected “Bam Bam.” Cabello has also released the album tracks “Oh Na Na,” featuring Myke Towers, and lead single “Don’t Go Yet.“ The day before the album drops, she'll perform songs from it as part of a live TikTok concert — “Familia: Welcome to the Family” airs at 7 p.m. ET on Cabello’s TikTok channel.
— Jack White has not one but two albums slated for 2022, the first of which is “Fear of the Dawn,” out Friday, April 8, with a title track that uses fuzzed-out guitars, slamming drums and sound effects pushed to 11. Another early preview is “Hi-De-Ho,” his oddly wonderful collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest figurehead Q-Tip that mixes electronically enhanced rock with a salute to jazz hero Cab Calloway. Don't dawdle: White's got the second album, “Entering Heaven Alive,” set for release on July 22. To get in the mood for that one, listen to the single "Queen of the Bees.”
— AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy
TELEVISION
— We all know think we know Ben Franklin: diplomat, kite-flyer, excellent at maxims (“a penny saved....”). Enter Ken Burns, whose two-part, four-hour PBS documentary “Benjamin Franklin” dives into the life and work of the Founding Father who lived during a remarkable period of social, political and scientific change and helped drive it. Franklin even set the template for future humorists such as Mark Twain, according to the documentary directed by Burns and written by Dayton Duncan (“Country Music,” “The National Parks”). Mandy Patinkin gives voice to Franklin in the film airing Monday and Tuesday, April 4 and 5, on PBS stations (check local listings for times).
— Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe star in “Tokyo Vice,” a HBO Max crime drama described as “loosely” inspired by Jake Adelstein’s 2009 memoir, “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.” Elgort plays Adelstein, who finds himself immersed in 1990s Tokyo, “where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem,” as HBO intriguingly puts it. The series was filmed in Tokyo, so it’s also an armchair adventure. “Tokyo Vice,” created and written by Tony-winning playwright J.T. Rogers (“Oslo”), debuts Thursday, April 7, with three episodes on the streaming service, with two episodes released on subsequent Thursdays until the April 28 finale.
— Celebrities try to stump each other with stories that may or may not be true in CW’s “Would I Lie To You?” based on a hit British series of the same name. Actor-writer-comedian Aasif Mandvi (“Evil”) hosts the series debuting Saturday, April 9, with Matt Walsh (“Veep”) and Canadian comedian Sabrina Jalees as opposing team captains. Among the season’s guests: Brooke Shields, Amber Ruffin, Laura Benanti, Michael Ian Black, Jordan Klepper and Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District. Legal advice, anyone?
— AP Television Writer Lynn Elber
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Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/apf-entertainment.