“My Life With the Walter Boys” Season 3 climbed to the top of Netflix’s top TV list in its second week on the streamer.

The YA series, which follows the love triangle between Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez), Cole (Noah LaLonde) and Alex (Ashby Gentry), scored 8.7 million views during the week of Aug. 10, landing atop the week’s top 10 English-langauge TV list. It climbed to the top compared to its debut week, when it landed in the No. 2 spot behind “The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare.”

Viewership for “My Life With the Walter Boys” Season 3 was down slightly from the second week of release last year, which saw Season 2 collect 10.9 million views. Seasons 1 and 2 have spent a combined 15 weeks in Netflix’s global top 10 list with over 130 million views since 2023.

The notable viewership for the series comes as Netflix doubles down on its commitment to YA as it gears up to close out the five-season run for “Outer Banks” as well as debut titles including “Crew Girl,” “The Body” and “Poser.”

More to come …

EXCLUSIVE: DOC NYC has announced a distinguished group of honorees for its upcoming 13^th edition, set to unspool in New York this November.

The annual Visionaries Tribute, to be held on the festival’s opening day at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, will see Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and filmmaker-sound recordist JT Takagi honored with Lifetime Achievement awards.

Gibney, director of a highly anticipated film about Elon Musk that will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, has long been recognized as one of the nonfiction film industry’s leading figures. His numerous credits include the Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Primetime Emmy-winning Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief, and Primetime Emmy winner Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. At Sundance earlier this year, Gibney premiered his documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie.

Takagi serves as executive director of Third World Newsreel, a progressive alternative media center, and teaches at The New School and City University of NY. Her filmmaking credits include Bittersweet Survival; Homes Apart: Korea; The Women Outside, and North Korea: Beyond the DMZ. “As a sound engineer, she has recorded numerous public television and theatrical documentaries that have earned Emmy and Cinema Audio Society awards,” notes a release, “including Yance Ford’s Strong Island and Stanley Nelson’s Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.”

At the Visionaries Tribute, DOC NYC will honor Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Stephen Maing with the Robert and Anne Drew Award for Documentary Excellence, named for the pioneering husband-and-wife filmmaking team. The award comes with a $5,000 cash prize furnished by Drew Associates.

Jill Drew, general manager of Drew Associates, said, “Observational documentary demands patience, perseverance, and precision planning. Stephen Maing has proven to be a master of the form. He is also a filmmaker for our times, focusing on characters who confront oppressive power structures. He has a gift not only for wielding a camera, but also for using it as a tool of empathy.”

Maing’s most recent film, The Great Experiment, which he directed with Eric Daniel Metzgar, premiered in March at the True/False festival in Columbia, MO. His previous films include Union, directed with Brett Story; Crime + Punishment; High Tech, Low Life, and The Surrender.

Oscar winner Raney Aronson-Rath (20 Days in Mariupol) will receive DOC NYC’s Leading Light Award, which honors “an individual making a critical contribution to documentary in a role other than as a filmmaker.”

Aronson-Rath serves as editor-in-chief and executive producer of Frontline, the PBS flagship investigative journalism documentary series. She also leads the GBH Documentary Unit, which encompasses Frontline, Nova, and American Experience. Among her recent credits is the Sundance award-winning documentary One in a Million, which Aronson-Rath executive produced.

“The Visionaries Tribute is an annual reminder of the breadth and depth of talent in our field,” commented DOC NYC co-founder and Director of Special Projects Thom Powers, who oversees the Visionaries event. “This year’s honorees exemplify a spirit of truth-telling against the odds. Alex Gibney has made several of the most attention-getting documentaries of the 21st Century. JT Takagi has a remarkable career as both a sound recordist and leader of Third World Newsreel. Stephen Maing has upheld a standard of excellence in observational filmmaking through his works. And Raney Aronson-Rath has led PBS’s Frontline to excel despite deep funding cuts to public television.”

DOC NYC’s competitive sections, as well as features and shorts named to its prestigious Short List section, and other news will be announced in the coming weeks. The festival takes place both in person and online: in-person events run from November 11-19 in New York City at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Village East by Angelika. The festival’s online presentations extend through November 29, with online screenings available to viewers across the U.S.

Paramount+’s film library is overflowing with gems of just about every genre, decade and tone.

Right now, the streamer’s greatest feature-length offerings include a 2002 dramedy that ranks as, perhaps, the best movie that Steven Spielberg has released this century, as well as a 2015 ensemble comedy that manages to turn one of the most economically convoluted moments in American history into decipherable drama. Paramount+ also has a mid-2010s drama that marked “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve’s first real, ambitious foray into the world of science fiction.

Here are the best movies on Paramount+ you can watch this week.

“Catch Me If You Can” (2002)

Few of the movies that Steven Spielberg has made over the last 26 years have a stronger case for being his best film of the 21st century than “Catch Me If You Can.” Based on a semi-autobiographical book by Frank Abagnale Jr., this con-man dramedy follows a young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he travels across America posing as a Pan Am pilot, Georgia doctor and Louisiana prosecutor, all while forging checks and defrauding the government out of millions of dollars. 

Both DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, the latter of whom plays the FBI agent pursuing DiCaprio’s Abagnale, make for a pitch-perfect pair onscreen, but Christopher Walken nearly steals the show with one of the best performances of his career as Frank’s lovelorn, disillusioned father. The film itself is, like so many of Spielberg’s best movies, a coming-of-age adventure about growing up and discovering yourself in the face of immense heartbreak and instability. (Have we mentioned it is also really, really fun?)

“The Big Short” (2015)

An incendiary, frequently hilarious dramedy, “The Big Short” uses fourth-wall-breaking humor, celebrity cameos and real-life anecdotes to turn the convoluted mess of America’s 2008 financial crisis into a legible, deeply infuriating tragedy of greed and hubris. Based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 book, the film follows multiple characters (played by Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale, among others) in the late 2000s as they anticipate, navigate and, in some cases, try to warn others about America’s impending economic collapse. 

Featuring one of the funniest turns of Gosling’s career and more memorable supporting performances than you can count, “The Big Short” takes a big swing and hits the mark. It is a pissed-off piece of work, and its anger is just as infectious as its comedy. 11 years later, director Adam McKay has yet to reach the same heights that he did with “The Big Short.”

“Arrival” (2016)

2016’s “Arrival” is one of the greatest science fiction movies of this century and still, a decade after its release, one of the best films “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve has made. Based on a 1998 novella by Ted Chiang, the film follows Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist who is tasked by the U.S. Army with learning how to communicate with a ship of aliens who have arrived on Earth. 

A slow-burn drama simmering with underlying tension and emotions, “Arrival” builds to its operatic conclusion with patience and grace. It earns every thrilling, race-against-the-clock moment of its climax, as well as the lingering heartache that its gasp-worthy finale twist is guaranteed to leave you with. Big-screen, contemporary sci-fi just does not get much better than this.