Julio Torres’s Sea Wench, Qween Jean at Little Island

The bonzer escapade of Flaco the Owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo successful February, 2023, is recounted successful fanatical item successful Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” The communicative is fundamentally crowdsourced, composed mostly of footage and photos changeable by dozens of devoted owlers who tracked the bird’s tenuous début connected the loose, his steep learning curve arsenic helium started hunting successful the park, his caller beingness arsenic a celebrity, and his perilous journeys done Manhattan. Lane fills retired the communicative with wide-ranging interviews, done connected location, with enthusiasts and scientists; the effect is an invigorating philosophical exploration of carnal life, a imaginativeness of the modern media spotlight, and a symphonic outpouring of the energy, passion, and cognition that marque the metropolis run.—Richard Brody (Screening July 29 successful Central Park; opening July 31 astatine IFC Center.)

Off Broadway

Jennifer Nettles’s caller musical, “Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo”—based connected the fable of the eponymous seventeenth-century Sicilian apothecary (played by Nettles) who dispatches her abusive hubby and supplies different women with the means to flight their ain unhappy marriages—is ambitious and intermittently captivating. Sumptuous staging, by Mary Zimmerman, evokes the brooding chiaroscuro of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, portion Didi Romero relishes each commedia dell’arte lazzo arsenic the big-haired Duchessa. Musically, the amusement straddles the styles of “Hamilton” hip-hop and the fatally thesis-driven “Suffs.” Vitoria (Naomi Serrano), Giulia’s daughter, disapproves of her mother’s actions, but her motivations are tidied distant by the end, with a solution of sub-“Sweeney Todd” vengeance.—R.F. (PAC NYC; done Aug. 2.)

Pick Three

Sarah Larson connected the summer’s champion podcasts.

1. “Dan Taberski’s Manifesto” argues that, done right, a manifesto is simply a nonviolent telephone to action, an “artful scream”—and, perhaps, conscionable what we request close now. Taberski (“Missing Richard Simmons”) studies important cris de cœur—by specified figures arsenic Luigi Mangione, the precocious Mohawk activistic Richard Oakes, and the punk instrumentalist Kathleen Hanna—and develops theories astir however to constitute a bully one. It’s a refreshing effect to a taste infinitesimal that has galore of us, arsenic Taberski says of himself, “seething underneath, each the time.”

2. I wasn’t expecting “OnlyFantasy,” a bid astir the OnlyFans adult-content phenomenon, to beryllium rather truthful moving and revelatory. Leon Neyfakh, the seasoned journalist-podcaster, and Gracie Canaan, an insightful comedian and an OnlyFans creator herself, co-host, sensitively interviewing fans, creators, and behind-the-scenes workers to recognize the science of OnlyFans intimacy. Much of the fantasy, we discover, is emotional, and we tin perceive it successful the vulnerability of interviewees’ voices.

3. “The Gaza Chef,” from the German paper Die Zeit and its personable investigative writer Yassin Musharbash, tells the communicative of Mahmoud Almadhoun, a young Palestinian navigator who ran a crockery room successful the Gaza Strip, and was killed by an Israeli projectile, successful 2024. Almadhoun had been a reporting root of Musharbash’s; erstwhile Musharbash learns of Almadhoun’s death, helium launches an bonzer distant probe into what happened and why. The results consciousness vivid and immediate, revealing overmuch astir endurance efforts successful Gaza and raising unnerving questions astir modern warfare, including the usage of A.I.