It’s always fun when the celebrity host of Saturday Night Live is also the musical guest, but perhaps better still when a deeply talented singer can hold her own as a comedic actress. That’s precisely what we’ve got in this weekend’s host, Ariana Grande, who will be joined at 8H by the legendary Stevie Nicks. While the show’s writers have already hung a lampshade on the Wicked mania surrounding Grande this year, personally, I hope we get an Elphaba/Galinda joke anyway. —Emma Specter
How to watch: Catch the show live on NBC at 11:30 p.m. EST or stream it hungover the next morning on Peacock.
Patrice: The Movie
Do yourself a favor, and spend an utterly delightful two-ish hours in the company of one of the most irresistible spirits you will ever encounter. Patrice Jetter faced various hardships over the course of her life: As a kid, she never really fit in, and often found herself subject to bullying and worse. Her mother, rather than attempt to figure out if there was a way to improve things, forced her to hide her differences and abused her when she acted out. Eventually, Patrice was committed. Flash forward several decades, and Patrice is joyfully working as a school crossing guard, living in stable housing, and in love with a fellow disabled person, Gary. The two have built a life for themselves that is limited and challenging (a gripping 15 or so minutes of the film are dedicated to the gargantuan challenge of overcoming the breakdown of a wheelchair-accessible van), but also full of joy and love and hope. The one, glaring inequity that Patrice and Gary still face, however, is that—because of the inanity of US law—they cannot get married without losing their disability benefits. As the film explains, they cannot even live together without jeopardizing their entire means of subsistence. Patrice is a documentary, but it is also a love story, and one that will enrage you while affirming its characters’ fundamental humanity. Told with both realistic, fly-on-the-wall narration and colorful flashbacks with school-age children embodying the adults in Patrice’s past (it somehow works), Patrice is also tonally unlike almost anything I’ve seen—an invigorating, inspiring, and deeply moving film. —CS
