Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, begins with a black screen that lingers for at least a full minute. There’s music in the form of a groaning score, as well as a smattering of noises—faint whispers, rustling leaves—that can be heard through the discordant notes. Otherwise, though, nothing appears.
The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints.
People clad in green tracksuits stand nervously in a circle. They’re participating in a “test” on Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix’s new reality competition series based on the streamer’s hit South Korean drama Squid Game, but they’re really just playing a game of chance. Each player must nominate someone to be eliminated, and then roll a dice. If they roll a six, the person they chose is eliminated.
Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets.
The Marvels arrives at a strange moment for Marvel Studios, the company that ushered in more than a decade of spandex-clad blockbusters. Because the (just-ended) SAG-AFTRA strike prohibited its actors from participating in promotional activities, the film is being released with little fanfare and is on track to make less at the box office than most of its comic-book predecessors.
Not long after the Writers Guild of America’s strike started in May, Eugene Ramos began trying to walk the picket lines at least twice a week every week. On such occasions, he dons his sunglasses and baseball cap—equipment for “war,” he calls it—to combat the Los Angeles sunshine, heads to a studio’s entrance, and scribbles his name on a sign-in sheet before joining the rally.
Only Murders in the Building is easy to watch. Each season follows Charles (played by Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez), true-crime podcasters who solve murders in the Arconia, the titular building in which they live. Every episode mines comedy from the trio’s generational differences and explores how their unusual shared hobby bolsters their equally unusual friendship.
Early on in the raunchy talking-animals comedy Strays, a montage plays of four dogs humping inanimate lawn ornaments, guzzling beer leaking from trash bags, and bonding over a plan to bite off a man’s genitals. It’s an inartfully staged sequence, packed with sophomoric jokes and enough f-bombs to rival a Quentin Tarantino film.
Any time I try to recommend How to With John Wilson to someone who has never heard of the show, I struggle to figure out where to begin. HBO markets it as a docuseries by the filmmaker John Wilson in which he explores the idiosyncratic behavior of New York City’s wackiest residents. But calling it a “docuseries” feels wrong; yes, the program relies on footage and interviews Wilson has collected from wandering through the city, but the material is also presented comedically.
This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.But the world cares very much about the movie he’s in.
This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.The Greta Gerwig–directed Barbie is like a Barbie superfan’s imagination run wild. There are elaborately choreographed dance numbers for the dolls. The dialogue pokes easygoing, knowing fun at Mattel’s products.
Forget Barbenheimer; July has a different double feature you should pay attention to. Two films premiering this weekend celebrate the value of putting on a practical production. One is the newest Mission: Impossible, a thrill ride as heartfelt as it is breathtaking. The other is Theater Camp, a mockumentary that, with apologies to Tom Cruise, might better underscore his message about the importance of committing one’s life to the arts (and at about half the runtime too).
Championing an underappreciated television show can be a joy, an inside secret you’ll share with other fans who have stumbled upon the same discovery. Sure, it’s no fun to feel like you’re the only person in your friend group watching, for instance, Veronica Mars—I certainly did back in the aughts—but as more people caught up and caught on over the years, finally getting to talk about the biggest twists and the best performances felt thrilling.
Joan is an ordinary woman with ordinary complaints. She wishes the coffee at her office tasted better. She thinks her new hairstyle might be a bit much. She loves her fiancé, but worries their sex life isn’t as exciting as it should be. “I feel like I’m not the main character in my own life story,” she explains at a therapy session. When her therapist asks her if she would like that to change, she nods.
In the previous season of Netflix’s sparkly teen comedy Never Have I Ever, Sherman Oaks High’s resident heartthrob, Paxton Hall-Yoshida (played by Darren Barnet), gave a poignant speech at his graduation about persistence. “Push yourself out there,” he told his classmates. “Defy other people’s expectations of you, and don’t ever let a label define you.
If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other’s feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.
Updated on May 29, 2023, at 1:48 a.m. ETThis article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.Talk about a ludicrously capacious feast.
This story contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Showtime’s Yellowjackets.Back when she was just a member of the championship high-school soccer team known as the Yellowjackets, Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher) was a wide midfielder, according to fans who studied the few scenes of the girls in action. The position comes with little glory. Wide midfielders don’t normally score the goals themselves; they are tasked with attacking from the wings and providing assists.
Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable.
The first time I saw Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I found myself sitting up a little straighter and leaning a little closer toward my TV. I knew Wong had a starring role, but Amy caught me off guard.
This story contains spoilers through the second episode of Succession Season 4.The Roys of Succession tend to go out of their way to prove they’re not delicate people. They reject any opportunity to talk about their feelings. They’d rather drop f-bombs than share hugs and kisses. And they relish their daily boardroom showdowns: Reneging on deals, jousting in bidding wars, and tearing apart competitors is, for them, a way of life.
Tetris is a simple, satisfying game. Blocks arranged in different geometric shapes fall from the top of the screen, get rotated to and fro, and fall into rows that clear when the pieces fit together just so. Playing Tetris can be a meditative experience; the game can be understood in any language and tackled by anyone of any age, and it can even seep into addicted players’ dreams. Tetris is popular because it’s pleasurable.
Gossip can provide sensational grist for an entertainer’s appeal, for better or worse. But for singer-songwriters whose artistry is often diaristic, scandal is especially intriguing.
This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 7.An abandoned mall at the end of the world is not a pretty sight. Stores, looted and left in disarray, offer only broken mannequins and empty shelves. Glass shards blanket the floors. Fluorescent bulbs flicker. A place once known as a center of commerce has become a dirt-strewn husk of its former self.
A few months ago, I nearly ran over one of Uber Eats’s delivery robots with my car. The little guy was trundling along a crosswalk when I made a left turn. As if startled by my presence, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, and its “eyes,” two rings of lights, blinked. Even though its position now meant that I couldn’t complete my turn and was stuck blocking oncoming traffic, I instinctively apologized.
Of the Brontë sisters, Emily has long been considered the most vexing. She was reportedly jovial around her siblings but disagreeable and timid around anyone else. Her equally tempestuous and aloof reputation left her friendless, and the novel Wuthering Heights—her bold, brutal masterpiece—incensed some readers while enthralling others. She’s a literary oddity, a creature whose reserved disposition seemed to belie a wildly inventive imagination.
Bowen Yang didn’t break first, but he was the cast member least able to handle the cascade of giggles that caused yesterday’s final Saturday Night Live sketch of the night to lose total control. Partway through “Lisa from Temecula,” a bit about a woman named Lisa (played by Ego Nwodim) aggressively carving up her “extra-extra-well-done” steak, Yang cracked up, throwing down his prop fork.
News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration.
In Velma, HBO Max’s adult-oriented Scooby-Doo spin-off, familiar faces get involved in all sorts of gritty, R-rated activities. Velma (played by the show’s executive producer, Mindy Kaling) and Daphne (Constance Wu) sell drugs. Fred (Glenn Howerton) gets shot in both legs. Shaggy (Sam Richardson), known by his birth name, Norville, tries to sell a kidney on the black market.
Early in Missing, a teenager named June (played by Storm Reid) gets a FaceTime call from her mother, Grace (Nia Long). Grace is about to leave June home alone for several days and wants her daughter to jot down some reminders. Instead of transcribing her mother’s advice, however, June key-smashes to give the impression that she’s diligently taking notes, eventually spelling out her annoyance: “omg omg stfuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.