From the daily newsletter: Flowers, a Black man who was tried six times in Mississippi by the same white prosecutor for a crime he did not commit, was the subject of the In the Dark podcast.

Canadians think America “is toxic and broken and can never be trusted again,” Chrystia Freeland, the former Deputy Prime Minister, tells David Remnick, and they’re seeking allies abroad.

President Trump spent some seven hours and 56 minutes addressing the (dwindling) Trump faithful in his campaign tour this week, a last-ditch effort to stave off what may be a loss of both the House and the Senate. His itinerary speaks to the abrupt reversal of fortunes for the Republicans this election year, with Trump stumping in what should be safely red territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, and back to Texas. Still, Trump insists he’s winning. “We achieved more in two years than any other Presidency in the history of our country,” he said on Wednesday, in San Antonio, Texas, where a Democrat—running against Trump’s hand-picked candidate—now stands an even chance of winning a Senate seat in the state for the first time since 1988. “But there was a note of un-Trumpian insecurity to it all that made this performance unlike any of the many previous Trump campaign tours I’ve watched during the past decade,” Susan B. Glasser writes. Read her latest column:

The investigative podcast In the Dark examines why Curtis Flowers, a Black man in Mississippi, was tried six times for the same crime, revealing a town divided by race and a conviction supported by questionable evidence.

Cristian Mungiu’s newest drama, “Fjord,” stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a conservative, evangelical couple who have recently moved with their five children from Bucharest to a tiny village on the Norwegian coast. One day, after bruises are spotted on one of their daughters' backs, Child Protective Services is called, and they are accused of physical abuse. Their children are taken from them. Some critics of the film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, have accused Mungiu of drifting politically to the right. Some have taken “Fjord” as an embrace of a mealy-mouthed both-sidesism that holds the left to be as susceptible as the right to the traps of ignorance, groupthink, and discrimination. Others have implied that the film exaggerates and demonizes the Scandinavian welfare state’s overreach to an absurdly unrepresentative degree. “To which I can only answer that I’ve seen ‘Fjord’ twice now,” Justin Chang writes. “The reductive generalizations that its critics seem eager to ascribe to it strike me as fundamentally at odds with the angularity, specificity, and darkly comic pungency of Mungiu’s telling.” Read his review:

During the Alabamian writer Rick Bragg’s first year at the New York Times, he returned to his home state to cover a tornado-wrought disaster. Bragg wrote a piece that begins, “This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.” In his 1997 memoir “All Over but the Shoutin’,” Bragg recounts that he received an outpouring of mail in response to the piece, concluding, “It wasn’t that I had gotten it right—God knows I mess up a lot—but that I had gotten it true.” Charles Bethea asked Bragg about that line. What’s the difference? “It’s the feeling.” He went on, “Because, at the end of the day, the feeling is what’s going to last. The numbers will shift.” Read about how Bragg became his generation’s bard of the South:

Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Musk,” “is an exhaustive recounting of [Elon] Musk’s metastasizing role in our society,” Sheelah Kolhatkar writes. “During a nearly four-hour runtime, it takes in his development of the satellite technology that has become crucial to modern warfare, his obsession with spawning children, and his transformation into a poster boy for global fascism.” “To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery,” Gibney says. “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?” The resulting documentary is “mesmerizing,” Kolhatkar continues. “But it’s also chilling, because even after so much examination, there’s still no straightforward explanation for Musk’s hold on society, and no clear path to wresting back control.” Read her review:

A growing movement has mobilized France’s youth against diminished school conditions and accumulating problems—and provided, for its detractors, a pretext for blaming the country’s ills on febrile adolescents.

Nathan Fielder has made a career from drastic interventionism. He poses merciless, confrontational questions to subjects and creates real-life simulations. The relationships he creates are mainly ones of power, and he doesn’t let his subjects forget it. But, when he turns his camera to Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, her preëxisting notoriety pushes back with its own power. “The result is a movie of dazzling conundrums and vertiginous paradoxes, leading Fielder ever deeper into emotional and intellectual wilds,” Richard Brody writes. Holmes is the subject of Fielder’s new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” which he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim. In 2022, she was convicted of four counts of fraud and sentenced to prison for more than 11 years. When Fielder asks her whether she has ever told a lie, she tells him that she hasn’t. (When pressed, she admits that she allows for white lies.)Read Brody’s full review of the new documentary:

The French student protesters’ demands are clear: smaller class sizes, more teachers, and better classroom conditions. Even blunter has been their messaging. Across the country, high school and university students have blockaded entrances to lycées and taken to the streets, equipped with signs reading “MACRON, FUCK YOUR PROF, NOT OURS,” and “TOO YOUNG TO BE LISTENED TO / OLD ENOUGH TO BE TEAR-GASSED.” The latter is a response to the violence that student protesters have faced in response to their actions. Demonstrations in France have been met with aggressive and sometimes outrageous policing. In the northern part of the country, a police officer threw a tear-gas grenade directly into a 14-year-old’s face and shattered his jaw. Another child had his hand blown off, picking up a police stun grenade. “Street protests, a fundamental French right, can be as effective a lever as litigation or the vote,” Lauren Collins writes. Read her dispatch from the barricades: