What to Watch: The 15 Best Movies and TV Shows of May

Here’s a roundup of the month’s best movies and TV shows, as covered by The Wall Street Journal’s critics.

The Kiss

A scene from ‘The Kiss.’

With his dozens of novels and stories, the wide-ranging Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) has been inspiring filmmakers for more than 90 years. The latest of many examples is “The Kiss,” from the eminent Danish director Bille August. As is typical of Zweig’s work, psychological depth combines with suspenseful plotting, in this case to serve a parable about the follies that led to World War I.

Pee-wee as Himself (Max)

Paul Reubens transforms himself into his character circa 1980.

Saturday-morning TV is traditionally for kids, but this quasi-adult drank many a weekend coffee watching “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” wishing I had a comfortable Chairry, a genie like Jambi, a reference tool like Globey and could walk on a Floory. It was one of the more creative shows ever to sneak onto network television (CBS), a twisted half-hour of joy.

Slightly less buoyant is “Pee-wee as Himself,” director Matt Wolf’s biography of the childlike character’s creator and alter ego, Paul Reubens, although revisiting the television show—its creation, construction and cast—is a delight. So are the clips and photos tracking the actor’s life and career, from his childhood in Sarasota, Fla., his tenure with the improvisational Groundlings, his road-show Pee-wee and the triumph of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”

Nonnas (Netflix)

Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro and Vince Vaughn in ‘Nonnas.’

“Being John Malkovich,” with its outlandish script by Charlie Kaufman, was one of the more creative and twisted concepts ever to make its way to the screen. So how about a spinoff called “Being Vince Vaughn”? No. Vince Vaughn is usually being Vince Vaughn.

But then something like “Nonnas” comes along and one detects a tampering with the recipe. A dash of poignancy? An intimation of mortality? Based on an actual New York restaurant that hired genuine grandmas to cook genuine Italian food, “Nonnas” is directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen”) with undistilled sincerity and dollops of goo. But Mr. Vaughn’s Joe Scaravella, who seems to hew quite closely to the story’s real-life restaurateur, is free of Vaughn-ish smirk. He approaches pathos.

Chaos (Viaplay)

A scene from ‘Chaos.’

“Chaos”—not to be confused with the defunct “Kaos” in which Jeff Goldblum was Zeus—has been described as “The Morning Show” in Danish. But there’s at least one important difference. Both series are concerned with how to make good television. Only one of them does.

TV about TV can be like writing about writers, a navel-gazing exercise in which an author might critique a genre, but only while genuflecting before it. Refreshingly, “Chaos” has enough going on in terms of subplots—they are many—that Big Media is less an object of worship than a simple backdrop for messy situations and messy people. Those people are also, it should be said, delightful to watch as they struggle through their self-sabotaging situations. Also, in Denmark, the media is not so big.

Tucci in Italy (National Geographic)

Chef Matilde Pettini and Stanley Tucci.

Actor Stanley Tucci and his favorite co-star—Italy—are back with the succinctly titled “Tucci in Italy,” which more than resembles the late, lamented “Searching for Italy,” the food-centric series canceled by CNN in 2022 in an effort to alienate as many viewers as possible. Give credit to Mr. Tucci: You can’t keep a gourmand down.

The new show, in which the actor eats his way across the country of his ancestors while still managing to wear a European-tailored wardrobe, is quite similar to the earlier series (which lasted two seasons). But the perspective, and the menu, has been broadened. Rather than simply exploring the regional distinctions and historical echoes to be found in various strains of Italian cuisine, Mr. Tucci connects Italian technology and industry to the quality of the food (which is really the star of the show).

Miss Austen (PBS)

Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen.

The 18th-century gift that keeps on giving—to biographers, academics, filmmakers, TV producers and, oh yes, readers—Jane Austen has an audience that snaps to attention at the suggestion that there’s more to learn about one of the great writers of the Western canon. That Austen has a “mystique” would have amused her. But it was enhanced by an early death (age 41, 1817), as well as by a relative dearth of documentation—something that can be blamed on Jane’s sister, the subject of the four-part “Miss Austen.”

Ghost Trail

Adam Bessa

Late last year, following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, citizens of Syria streamed into Saydnaya prison, where for years the regime had confined, tortured and killed its ostensible enemies. It was a scene of triumph overshadowed by tragedy. A fortress of evil became overrun by the people, who were forced in turn to face the unaccountable losses it had been home to. Parties roved its grounds and probed its deepest chambers, hoping for signs of life, but most could expect only the worst kind of reward, be it a body or a sheet of paper bearing names and abrupt fates. “Executed, executed, dead from sickness,” ran one list reported by the Journal in December.

Hamid (Adam Bessa), the protagonist of director Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail,” survived this hell. Whether he will ever truly escape it is an overarching question of the film, a muted thriller whose taut surface stretches across tragedies of violence and displacement.

The Better Sister (Prime Video)

Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks in ‘The Better Sister.’

“No movie gets better after the first five minutes,” a film critic friend once observed, without adding “Alas.” What about television? Judging by “The Better Sister,” a series can start out being stupid and obvious and eventually make fun of the stupid and the obvious, all the while upscaling its own genre.

Which genre? The multi-part, premium-cable mystery series centered on a female protagonist—or several—with the crimes at hand being subordinate to the relationships, and the relationships bordering on the psychotic. Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have specialized in these projects—acting, producing or doing both in the likes of “Big Little Lies,” “Little Fires Everywhere,” “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple,” the productions always based on a popular book. The men are feckless, the money abundant. The women are valiant and, even when trashy, sympathetic.

Love

Andrea Bræin Hovig and Thomas Gullestad in ‘Love.’

The 60-year-old Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud has embarked on a loose trilogy whose parts bear titles so death-and-taxes fundamental as to suggest a ponderously sweeping ambition. First comes “Love,” opening this weekend, and then come “Sex” and “Dreams,” due later this year.

Yet “Love,” at least, has few pretensions of being a grand statement. It’s a modest, moving drama abundant with conversation, and while the movie considers major questions—about intimacy, monogamy, care—it never becomes weighed down by them. This is, in part, because it’s also a shimmering, contemplative portrait of a handful of people and the modern city in which they live. Fair warning: It might make you want to move to Oslo.

Octopus! (Prime Video)

A scene from ‘Octopus!’

David Attenborough, Peter Coyote and Keith David all have their place among documentary narrators, Mr. Attenborough as concerns the natural world, Messrs. Coyote and David as concerns the world according to Ken Burns. But it’s hard to beat Phoebe Waller-Bridge in “Octopus!” for pure entertainment, quippery, and a voice that wraps around the brain like a tentacle. All educational TV should be so mellifluously amusing.

Duster (Max)

Josh Holloway

The two-door Duster might not have been the GTO, or the Chevelle SS. And Josh Holloway might not be Steve McQueen (’68 Mustang, “Bullitt”) or Burt Reynolds (’77 Trans Am, “Smokey and the Bandit”). But Mr. Holloway and his vintage Plymouth help make the eight-part “Duster” a clever homage to the muscle-car-and-machismo movie of the ’70s drive-in. With the fuel additive of a murder mystery.

BLUE: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue (PBS)

George Rodrigue

During an interview for “BLUE: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue,” the artist’s son Jacques says that if you had called his grandmother a “Cajun,” she might have slapped your face. But the “derogatory term” that would have ticked off grandma was something his father—best known for his “Blue Dog” paintings (see the Absolut vodka ads)—made into a brand. And a cause.

Judging by director Sean O’Malley’s briskly told story and visually absorbing film, Rodrigue seemed to know everyone of renown in Louisiana, an eclectic number of whom are interviewed here—quarterback Drew Brees, chef Emeril Lagasse, political adviser James Carville, fellow artist James Michalopoulos and Rodrigue’s biggest champion, his widow, Wendy Rodrigue-Magnus, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable source about both the man and his work. What no one can quite nail down—which may be a compliment to Rodrigue’s sensibility—is just how his paintings reflected the essence of Louisiana. They just insist it did.

Deaf President Now! (Apple TV+)

Tim Rarus, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Gregory Hlibok and Jerry Covell in ‘Deaf President Now!’

It takes years to become fluent in sign language, according to a principal figure in the documentary “Deaf President Now!” It isn’t something you learn overnight. And yet, there’s one gesture that has always been immediately understood by both the deaf and hearing worlds. It involves a finger. Which was offered to Gallaudet University by its student body in 1988.

The offense? The hiring of a hearing person with no sign-language skills to head the world’s most famous school for the deaf. At the time, the university in the nation’s capital was 124 years old, having been founded by an act of Congress signed by Abraham Lincoln. The peaceful but angry eruption took place at a time that just preceded the Americans With Disabilities Act (though the implication is that the protests hastened passage). The deaf community at Gallaudet was ready for a deaf president. It thought the world was, too.

Mr. Polaroid (PBS)

Edwin Land demonstrating the Land Camera for the Optical Society of America in 1947.

Edwin Land—forbidding, obsessive, brilliant and the subject of the “American Experience” presentation “Mr. Polaroid”—was an idol of Steve Jobs, according to Land biographer Ron Fierstein, because his technology company “made products people didn’t even know they wanted.” Some they needed and couldn’t get: Polarized headlights, for instance, which would have used Land’s innovative film, cut the glare of oncoming cars, saved lives and cost auto companies more than they wanted to spend. “It was a great idea,” writer Christopher Bonanos says with a laugh, “and still hasn’t been worked out 80 years later.”

Antidote (PBS)

A scene from ‘Antidote.’

Those familiar with recent films about the lives and deaths of the Putin opposition—the Oscar-winning “Navalny”; “Citizen K”; several “Frontline” exposés—will also be familiar with Christo Grozev, credited in the new “Frontline” installment “Antidote” with developing “a new form of journalism that takes human sources and their personal agendas out of the equation”; Mr. Grozev calls it the “art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs.” While he has appeared in several of these documentaries about the regime of Vladimir Putin, “Antidote” casts Mr. Grozev as the lead. By every indication, he’d much prefer being a supporting player.