Ali's Breakout Star, Seuss Splits Critics, Elder Scrolls Sentinel

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Coming up on Spotlight: Muhammad Ali gets an authorized series with a breakout lead, critics can't agree on Bill Hader's Cat in the Hat, and after eight years, the next Elder Scrolls finally has a name.

The Greatest is streaming now on Prime Video, all eight episodes at once. It's the first authorized scripted series about Muhammad Ali, with his widow Lonnie Ali as an executive producer, and it makes a smart choice: it doesn't try to cover the whole life. The season opens with young Cassius Clay winning Olympic gold in Rome in 1960 and builds toward his first shot at the heavyweight title, and his turn into Muhammad Ali through the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, played by Michael Ealy. Giovanni Ribisi plays trainer Angelo Dundee.

The name to remember is Jaalen Best, a relatively unknown actor playing one of the most imitated men of the twentieth century. The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg calls it a star-making performance, with Best building Clay's voice from a soft Kentucky lilt into what Fienberg calls a "poetry-spewing trumpet." He also says the fights track the record so closely you could pull up old footage of the Henry Cooper bout or the first Sonny Liston fight and watch them line up. He calls the series uneven and openly worshipful, even keeping the legend of Clay throwing his gold medal into the Ohio River, a story Fienberg says is generally believed to be a ghostwriter's embellishment. His verdict: Ali is big enough to handle a little heavy-handedness.

Now, the Cat. Dr. Seuss published The Cat in the Hat in 1957, and nearly seventy years later the Cat finally gets an animated feature, opening Friday. Bill Hader voices the Cat, and the movie gives him a day job: he works for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, under a boss voiced by Giancarlo Esposito, with Quinta Brunson as his friend in HR. His assignment is two gloomy kids whose mom, voiced by America Ferrera, just moved them to a new town.

Critics are split right down the striped hat. Deadline's Pete Hammond calls it delightful and worth the wait. Variety's Owen Gleiberman says it's so overstuffed it plays like a Marvel movie for tots. Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter says it captures Seuss's silliness but not his charm. Scheck does single out Matt Berry as Waffles the goldfish, watching the chaos with what Scheck calls droll, deadpan sophistication, and one silent, slow-motion shot of that fish swimming across the screen that runs about forty seconds and gets funnier as it goes. The one point of agreement: nobody misses the 2003 Mike Myers version.

Elder Scrolls fans, after eight years of asking, you get one word. In a video marking Bethesda's fortieth anniversary, Todd Howard said everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6, so, quote, "what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called." It's Sentinel. Sentinel is a city in Hammerfell, the homeland of the Redguard, west of Oblivion's Cyrodiil and southwest of Skyrim, and the logo arrived wrapped in desert sand. That's the whole reveal. No release date, no platforms, no gameplay. The game was announced back in 2018 and entered full production in 2023, so Skyrim, from 2011, keeps its job a while longer.

The Tokyo International Film Festival gave its top prize to a film with a terrific title: Sister Brother Manhole Cover, from Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski. It's a comic allegory about two siblings in Skopje who make their living stealing manhole covers and copper busts, until a stolen bronze bust of a national hero lands on the brother's foot and drags them into the city's underworld. The special jury prize went to Magic Atlas, an animated feature the artist Sun Xun spent about a decade making, which shifts from ink-wash painting to medieval European engraving.

Blue Eye Samurai returns to Netflix on January 19th, more than three years after its Emmy-winning first season. Mizu, voiced by Maya Erskine, takes her bloody quest to London, while back in Japan, Akemi and Taigen navigate Edo Castle under a dangerous new shogun. A third and final season is planned for 2028.

On Friday, the Arkansas folksinger Willi Carlisle releases The Universal Bubba, a seventeen-song double album produced by Tyler Childers, his first time in the producer's chair, recorded in two weeks in New Orleans. Stereogum named it Album of the Week, with Chris DeVille calling it Carlisle's most ambitious work yet, a record that celebrates and subverts Southern culture. Carlisle's own pitch is hard to beat: it should sound like "getting drunk at the civil war re-enactment" and "dropping acid at the square dance." And the title character? "The universal bubba," he says, "is somebody who can fix anything."

And one for the sci-fi faithful: Starlog is back. The fan magazine that launched in 1976 and ran 374 issues publishes its first new edition in seventeen years on November 13th. It's an annual now, edited by io9 founding editor Annalee Newitz, and issue one opens with a question Starlog's old readers would love: could we farm crops on other planets?

That's Spotlight for today. If you start The Greatest tonight, keep an eye on the footwork. See you tomorrow.