Big women on the small screen: Sophia, Elizabeth, Maggie and Diana

There is much to enjoy in Netflix's movie The Life Ahead, an adaptation of French-Jewish writer Romain Gary's novel, which stars Sophia Loren as a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute in a coastal town in southern Italy who cares for the children of other prostitutes. It's a remake of Moshe Mizrahi's Madame Rosa starring Simone Signoret, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1978. While I am generally not a fan of movies about irascible older folks who bond with cute but initially difficult children, The Life Ahead tells this essentially predictable story superbly. First of all, it's Sophia Loren, a huge star who became famous for her beauty but who is actually a fine actress. She won a Best Actress Oscar in 1962 for Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, about a widow and her daughter during World War II. She was also the first to win an acting Oscar for a performance not in English, and is still one of only a handful of actors to accomplish this. In The Life Ahead, directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, she has incredible screen presence as she fights to raise the children in her care, while struggling with failing health and the trauma from her experiences at Auschwitz. The screenplay is by Ugo Chiti, who wrote the gangster drama Gomorra, and he brings a certain grittiness to the story. In the previous adaptation, Rosa was raising an Arab orphan named Momo, but fittingly, in the new production, Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) is an illegal Senegalese migrant. Momo lost his mother under horrible circumstances and, understandably, trusts no one. Madame Rosa doesn't feel at first she has the strength to tame another troubled orphan, but eventually agrees to take him in. While the town of Bari looks lovely, the neglect of migrants there is ugly and the movie spotlights that, as well as showing the kinship and alliances that develop among immigrants, prostitutes and other outsiders. In addition to the pleasure of watching Loren tackling a meaty role after many years of retirement, we get to see her teach Hebrew prayers to a Romanian child to prepare him for his bar mitzvah, and she pronounces everything in a lovely accent. The big news in the TV streaming world this week was the release of the fourth season of Netflix's The Crown, which focuses on three women: Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman), of course, newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin). Colman is masterful in her second season as the monarch, and Anderson and Corrin do very well playing famous and sometimes divisive figures. THE SERIES features moments great and small that many outside of Britain may not remember, such as the night an unemployed, schizophrenic man broke into Buckingham Palace and, in the series' telling, had a long talk with the Queen; the outbreak of the Falkland Islands War; the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA; the conflict between Thatcher and Elizabeth over imposing sanctions on South Africa during the apartheid era; and a shocking (and true) secret that Princess Margaret discovers about the royal family. It all plays out alongside the unfolding of the Charles and Diana story, about which most of us already know as much as we'd like to. One surprise that came out in the publicity run-up to the new season was that Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret, is Jewish. Her maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, was a Spanish diplomat who helped Jews escape from France, and she took part in a documentary about him. “Now I'm just completely obsessive about finding out these things, looking for secrets in attics,” she told The Guardian. “I've always felt very Jewish, even though we never practiced. But we grew up very conscious of my mother's Jewish family, and we were always brought up to be very proud of that.” Between the World and Me, a new HBO movie, is an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book about the African-American experience, which is written as a letter to his teenage son. The actors who participate include two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Courtney B. Vance and Oprah Winfrey, and they are joined by Coates himself and controversial political activist Angela Davis. Davis has been accused of antisemitism and her participation may offend some, but that isn't a reason to skip this film, which illuminates the struggles of African-Americans recently and throughout history. The movie showcases some of America's finest actors at their best and was filmed just this summer, during the pandemic. It will be available on Hot VOD, Next TV and Cellcom TV starting on November 22, and on Hot HBO at 10 p.m. on November 27. While we love to celebrate athletes, we don't always realize the toll that competing can take on them. The struggles with mental challenges that athletes face is the subject of a new documentary, The Weight of Gold, which will be shown on Yes Docu at 10 p.m. on November 29, and will also be on Yes VOD and Sting TV. The film features interviews with current and former athletes, as well as with psychologists and coaches. The athletes interviewed include American figure skater Sasha Cohen, alpine ski racer Bode Miller and swimmer Michael Phelps.

Big women on the small screen: Sophia, Elizabeth, Maggie and Diana

While I am generally not a fan of movies about irascible older folks who bond with cute but initially difficult children, The Life Ahead tells this essentially predictable story superbly.

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Big women on the small screen: Sophia, Elizabeth, Maggie and Diana

While I am generally not a fan of movies about irascible older folks who bond with cute but initially difficult children, The Life Ahead tells this essentially predictable story superbly.

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