A New Wave of Movies Finds an Unexpected Way of Capturing the 2020s

Sam Crane was in the middle of doing Macbeth when the bullets started flying. A veteran of the British stage, Crane was on the verge of playing the lead in the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when COVID-19 shut down live performances, and by the U.K.'s third lockdown, he was itching for an audience. So instead of playing to a West End crowd, he found himself orating to a smattering of heavily armed lawbreakers inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. "If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other," he calls out amid the tomorrows and tomorrows. "And don't kill the actors either!"