Poor, poor Mickey Barnes. The protagonist of the film Mickey 17 lives a grim existence as an “expendable,” a worker aboard a spaceship whose only job is to die repeatedly for the sake of human progress. Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, is subjected to lethal viruses, exposed to radiation, and asked to sit in a chamber of nerve gas, just so he can report on his own deterioration until he loses consciousness.
As soon as Conan O’Brien strode onto the Oscars stage Sunday night, he looked like he belonged there. He was self-deprecating, telling the crowd to sit down before he continued, even though no one was standing. He found Demi Moore in the audience and greeted her with a grin; he had just played a pre-recorded clip of himself emerging out of her back as a nod to her work in the Best Picture-nominated body horror film The Substance.
For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of leading a prestigious film. She plays the title character in Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman and seeks to build a more virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has faced waves of backlash since its release last year—but it has also found a devoted fan base among awards bodies.
This article contains spoilers through the end of Yellowjackets Season 2.
A funny thing can happen to a hit show when it’s no longer the hot new thing on television. If such a series manages to produce more seasons, it often becomes weirder, stranger, and more specific, narrowing its appeal rather than attempting to maintain its wider following. Twin Peaks moved beyond probing its central mystery and into exploring the dream logic of its titular town.
In the film September 5, the ABC Sports studio at the 1972 Munich Olympics seems like an uncomfortable space in which to work, let alone think. The control room is smoky, the air conditioner barely functions, and every piece of machinery generates a frustrating amount of background noise. Yet the producers and reporters inside are more than capable of focusing on their jobs as they put together engaging, daily live broadcasts of the Games.
In an interview she gave prior to hosting last night’s Golden Globes ceremony, the comedian Nikki Glaser explained how she prepared for the job. She put together two writers’ rooms and did more than 90 test runs. She debated the meanness of punchlines. She fought with her boyfriend (who is also her producer) over whether the actor Jesse Eisenberg or the podcast “Call Her Daddy” would be better recognized by the stars in the room.
Her efforts paid off.
When the South Korean drama Squid Game hit Netflix in 2021, the show became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The story of people in debt competing to the death for a massive cash prize looked like nothing else on television, juxtaposing candy-colored children’s games with horrifying hyper-violence. Squid Game soon turned forest-green tracksuits into a trendy Halloween costume. It helped enter the word dalgona—the sugary treat used in one of the contests—into the pop-culture lexicon.
During his fourth time hosting Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock brought a particularly magnetic and mischievous energy—one that showed his mastery of being a good-natured troll. In the show’s best moments, it followed suit: The episode was packed with sketches that feinted toward seemingly familiar premises before upending them, and many of Rock’s characters tapped into his punchy stand-up persona and button-pushing sense of humor.
This article contains spoilers for the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
When the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins, an Iranian lawyer named Iman (played by Missagh Zareh) has just been promoted to “investigating judge.” The position gets him a higher salary, promises him a luxurious three-bedroom home—and arms him with a gun.
When Mean Girls, the musical remake of the 2004 film, hit theaters in January, the film appeared to shock audiences for, well, being a musical. Theatergoers recorded the moment that their fellow viewers realized what kind of movie it was; in one video, the crowd groans loudly as soon as a character starts singing, before laughing at their own reactions. But the studio behind the remake wasn’t surprised by these responses.
Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time.
When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he said to a silent audience. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants.
While working on his latest film, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the movie itself? He’d have microphones placed throughout audiences at every screening, so that at a predetermined moment, everyone who wanted to could ask the characters a question—and someone on-screen would respond. It would bridge the gap between fact and fiction. It would prove that cinema-going could truly be a unique experience.
As he accepted the Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series last night, Richard Gadd, the creator and star of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, made a plea to the audience. “If Baby Reindeer has proved anything, it’s that there’s no set formula to this, that you don’t need big stars, proven IP, long-running series… to have a hit,” he said. “The only constant across any success in television is good storytelling, good storytelling that speaks to our times.
The journey to bring The Crow back to life has been as tortured as its immortal antihero. The original 1994 adaptation of the comic-book series, about a man who returns from the dead to hunt down his and his lover’s killers, became a cult classic for its moody tone and grungy noir look. The film also bore the weight of an on-set tragedy: Its star, Brandon Lee, died after being shot by a malfunctioning prop gun. (He’d completed enough work for the movie to be finished in postproduction.
Near the end of The Truman Show, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) flees his home in the middle of the night. He’s come to believe that his surroundings are fake, that the people around him are actors, and that everything he does is being broadcast as “authentic” entertainment to an audience. He’s right, of course: Watching over him is the godlike Christof (Ed Harris), the program’s mastermind. “Cue the sun,” orders Christof.
This story includes spoilers through Season 2, Episode 4, of HBO’s House of the Dragon.
If only Princess Rhaenys had unleashed her dragon, Meleys, in the Season 1 finale of House of the Dragon. Back then, the Targaryen royal (played with a quiet gravitas by Eve Best) had the perfect opportunity to end a war before it began. But she left the throne’s usurpers unharmed, later explaining that such a conflict was not hers to start.
As it turns out, it was hers to lose.
In one of the hardest scenes to watch in Game of Thrones, a young girl is murdered by her own father. Late in Season 5, Stannis Baratheon (played by Stephen Dillane) burns alive his only child, Shireen (Kerry Ingram), in a misguided attempt to help his army advance. She screams for mercy over and over, while he watches in stony silence.
Long before the HBO drama’s disappointing final season, Shireen’s death tested my resolve to continue the show—but only for a moment.
This story contains spoilers for the entirety of Bridgerton Season 3.
The resident bully of Bridgerton, Cressida Cowper, has changed—really. After several humbling seasons on the marriage market, the character played by Jessica Madsen has stopped trying to insult-sling her way to the top of the eligible-bachelorette pile. Instead, in the show’s third season, she makes a bold claim that could cast her out of Regency London’s high society altogether.
Fast & Furious 6. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Top Gun: Maverick. For decades, Memorial Day weekend has been a reliable time for unveiling a new installment in a popular film franchise, sometimes to the tune of more than $100 million at the box office over the holiday break.
But this year’s Memorial Day weekend returns were meager, delivering a blow to Hollywood. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, earned just $32 million; the other new release, The Garfield Movie, cracked only $31 million.
Even as a little girl, Furiosa understood the value of staying hidden in the wasteland of postapocalyptic Earth, where resources are scarce, war is everlasting, and strangers are immediately treated as threats. But keeping out of sight is not the easiest task in the Mad Max films.
On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris.
But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned.
As an actor, Dev Patel has tended to play bighearted softies in rousing crowd-pleasers. Though he’s occasionally ventured beyond such territory—see his brooding, magnetic work in 2021’s The Green Knight—Patel’s résumé highlights include playing an embattled game-show contestant in Slumdog Millionaire, a kind manager in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, and a haunted adoptee in Lion.
There is rarely a good time for Godzilla to show up, but the MonsterVerse version of him could not have picked a worse moment to rampage again. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth entry in Legendary Pictures’s slate of movies featuring lumbering kaiju and dubious continuity, arrives just weeks after Japan’s Godzilla Minus One concluded its impressive box-office run in the States.
This story contains mild spoilers for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.
In Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, a scientist being manipulated by an extraterrestrial force is told to look up at the sky one night and watch the universe “wink” at him. The effect—akin to stars blinking on and off in unison—won’t be visible to Miao Wang’s naked eye; he has to use special glasses to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation.
The Oscars are not built for somber appeals about current events, though the show has tried in the past to balance celebration with seriousness. Sometimes that effort has worked: In 2002, after 9/11, Tom Cruise opened the evening with a vague but elegant speech about needing movie magic “more than ever,” which eased the apparent anxiety in the room.
You know you’ve delivered an Oscars speech for the history books when your fellow nominees are getting teary. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won the Best Supporting Actress trophy tonight for her work in The Holdovers, spoke about her career with such earnest passion that she received no shortage of weepy faces from her competitors: Jodie Foster could be seen welling up, as could America Ferrera.
Randolph thanked her mother, her acting teacher, and even her publicist—a funny role reversal.
Alejandro, the protagonist of the film Problemista, is an aspiring toy designer who creates idiosyncratic renditions of classic objects. To him, every toy truck should come with a tire that slowly deflates to illustrate the concept of running out of time. Cabbage Patch Kids should hold cellphones that display worrisome notifications, such as an unexpected Venmo charge from a frenemy. My favorite is his concept for Barbies: His version of the doll keeps her fingers crossed behind her back.
Expats, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling novel The Expatriates, is a slow-burn drama following the lives of three American women in Hong Kong in the aftermath of a tragedy. Each protagonist deals with complicated feelings of grief as their lives overlap, with the affluent Margaret (played by Nicole Kidman) serving as the story’s anchor.
Earlier this month, I watched what will probably be the strangest movie I see all year. Sasquatch Sunset is an absurdist film chronicling the lives of four Bigfoots (Bigfeet?). The cast, which includes Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, donned heavy prosthetics, layers of makeup, and furry costumes to play the titular mythical creatures. The script is devoid of dialogue.