Hello and happy Friday! I have not yet seen this week’s big theatrical release, Masters of the Universe, because my internist says my hunk levels are too high. So I will spend the following few days in monastic sensory deprivation and brave the Galitzine storm next week. (We’ll be talking about it on Critical Darlings—wherever you get your podcasts!—next Thursday.) But fear not! I have a movie and a TV show to recommend to you this week, things that are not hunk-free but are about more than just the gleaming hard-bods of Eternia. 

Cape Fear (AppleTV+, June 5) 

One of the best performances of Amy Adams’s career is in the HBO mini-series Sharp Objects, a heated, languid mystery about a troubled woman having a terrible homecoming. Adams’s new mini-series, Cape Fear, is also hot and sweaty and leering, but in altogether more sensational, near-camp fashion. 

Which isn’t a bad thing! It’s just that this adaptation of The Executioners and the films the novel inspired—the 1962 and 1991 versions of Cape Fear—is not going for the higher-minded artistry of Sharp Objects. Created by Nick Antosca—who’s done horror (Channel Zero) and dark melodrama (The Act)—and directed by people like Morten Tyldum, Reed Morano, and Trey Edward Shults, the series piles on gnarly embellishment after gnarly embellishment in a way that makes Martin Scorsese’s baroque 1991 film look austere. 

Adams puts on a crazy Southern accent to play Anna Bowden, a recovering alcoholic and hotshot lawyer who works for something like the Innocence Project. Her husband, Tom (Patrick Wilson), is a lawyer in the very-much-for-profit private sector. They’ve got a beautiful Savannah home with a swimming pool in the yard and a pair of teenage kids who, well, actually kind of suck, but I’ll get to them in a minute. 

A scandal hangs over Anna and Tom’s marriage, and their professional reputations: Anna was the defense attorney for a man named Max Cady (Javier Bardem) who was on trial, 17 years prior, for killing his pregnant wife. Tom was the prosecutor and the two fell in love sometime around (or during?) the trial; we are made to wonder if maybe they colluded to get Cady, a menacing but sinisterly charming figure, sent to prison. Then, of course, Cady gets out of the clink and all hell breaks loose.