Amazon Prime Video, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: Rosamund Pike stars as Marie Curie in this new dramatized biography, in which she holds aloft a small vial of radium and lectures her fellow scientists that this mysterious element “does not behave as it should.” The same certainly is true of the woman herself, as she stages two fights: to unlock the secrets hidden within radium and to fight for credit once her discoveries are made and confirmed. Radioactive is saddled with some unimaginative biopic tropes, including the tired one-person-clapping trick that slowly builds to a standing ovation – but the story itself is so interesting, and so relatively unfamiliar in its specifics, that it’s worth a peek. Especially since it’s being unveiled on Amazon as part of its prime subscription.
Movies On Demand, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: This new documentary, available starting today as an On Demand streaming offering, looks at the photography of Helmut Newton, as well as the reaction to it. Over the years, he framed pictures in which both fashion models and open-minded celebrities posed for him in provocative wardrobe, settings, and situations. This documentary includes new interviews with such former photographic subjects as Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, and Grace Jones – as well as with those who denounce Newton’s provocative fashion photos as being less sexy than sexist.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
This is a repeat, but it’s also a series launch – of a new summer series PBS is calling “Broadway at Home.” A summer-long series of Friday telecasts of staged plays and musicals captured for TV, it’s clearly reacting to the pandemic-era success of England’s “National Theatre at Home,” which ended its brilliant spring season yesterday with a gorgeous production of Amadeus. “Broadway at Home” begins tonight with another showing of the Great Performances presentation of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s delightful 2016 version of She Loves Me, starring Laura Benanti, Zachary Levi, and Jane Krakowski. It’s a light, lovely musical. The performances are charming – and this musical, most of which takes place in a parfumerie, has such an evocative set design, it’s almost like watching in Smell-O-Vision. Check local listings.
TCM, 4:15 a.m. ET
Long, long before there was Foxy Brown the rapper, there was Foxy Brown, the movie – the 1974 film starring Pam Grier in the title role. She plays the girlfriend of a federal agent killed by a kinky couple running a prostitution ring, and Foxy seeks revenge by going undercover as a prospective new employee. Grier is a powerful character here, as significant in cinema history in both gender and racial studies, and her performance here is best described as fierce. Co-stars include Antonio Fargas, who one year later moved on to the less notable role of Huggy Bear, the streetwise informant on ABC’s Starsky and Hutch.