In a hayloft overlooking the soy fields, dirt roads, and rustic houses that make up their isolated religious colony, eight women gather for a discussion. The eldest ones lead. The youngest two braid each other’s hair. They talk and talk and talk for hours, trying to reach a decision before the men who hurt them return the next day. Often, the women nitpick one another’s words—why they’re chosen, how they’re used, and what they mean.
This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.
This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé of the producer Harvey Weinstein was undeniably consequential. Their investigative reporting for The New York Times helped kick-start a cultural reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse across a wide range of industries. In 2019, the duo chronicled their work in the book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.
Glass Onion begins with a puzzle—or rather, a series of puzzles. Each of the new characters in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel receives an intricate box packed with gears and motors that crank out riddles and codes. Once they’re deciphered, the package unveils an invitation to a weekend getaway on a remote island owned by a wealthy acquaintance. It’s a classic murder-mystery setup.
In the final track of Midnights, Taylor Swift confesses to being a “mastermind” who plans so carefully that she can’t possibly lose. The song is addressed to her lover, but she might as well be singing about the meticulous rollout of her new album. Over the course of nearly two months, she posted cryptic videos teasing the music without allowing anyone to hear a single note. She put together a “manifest” that looked like something out of the metaverse.
When the writer-director Charlotte Wells began conceiving of Aftersun, her exquisite debut feature, she didn’t plan to unravel a parent-child dynamic. She simply wanted to observe how any conventional relationship can shift in a new place—so she situated her characters in a resort, outside of their regular routines.
The first Harry Potter film initially depicts the night Harry learns he’s a wizard like a scene from a horror movie. Harry and the disagreeable Dursleys—his uncle, aunt, and cousin—have escaped to a cottage on a remote island, attempting to outrun the letters alerting Harry to his magic. But the messenger arrives anyway, in the form of a half-giant named Hagrid.
About halfway into Park Chan-wook’s new film, Decision to Leave, a woman reaches into a man’s pocket to find a stick of lip balm. The two of them are alone, visiting a temple amid a downpour. She silently removes the cap, rolls the wheel to expose the tube, and applies it onto his chapped lips. He’s shocked at first, almost reluctant, but she smears away with quick, confident strokes. Then she smiles, as if to say, There. That’s better.
Hocus Pocus, as a film, makes little sense. The plot, about a coven of witches who seek to eat children, involves a talking cat, a boy who despises trick-or-treating, and far too many mentions of virgins lighting candles. Released inexplicably in the middle of summer 1993, it was a box-office failure that put off critics.But Hocus Pocus, as a cultural phenomenon, makes perfect sense. The costumes are easily replicable, the one-liners fantastically quotable.
Nothing against all of the other Emmy winners tonight, but even the most perfectly rehearsed, elegantly delivered acceptance speech couldn’t possibly compare to Sheryl Lee Ralph’s moment in the spotlight. In the minutes after the actor won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, she sang and beamed and soliloquized, inspiring the audience to leap to their feet again and again—and again.
This story contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 4 of House of the Dragon.Like a court musician ordered to strum a princess’s favorite tunes under a Weirwood tree, HBO’s House of the Dragon knows how to play all the hits that satisfy Game of Thrones fans. The small-council meetings crackle with passive-aggressive tension. The sets look eye-popping, the dragons only more so. The battle sequences appear to spill enough blood to fill the Narrow Sea.
Rogue One sets itself apart from other Star Wars films seconds after it starts. There is no opening crawl, no wall of yellow font drifting into a star field. The franchise logo doesn’t appear, and the John Williams fanfare doesn’t kick in. There is merely the title card informing viewers that it’s “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—and then bam: The action begins.
When Johnny Depp showed up at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, the audience seemed shocked. The actor wasn’t there to present a trophy or perform a tune. His mini monologue, in which he joked about how he “needed the work,” was hard to hear. His face, superimposed onto a life-size version of a Moonman, was hard to see.
New TV shows have it rough these days—especially if they don’t take place in Westeros, Middle Earth, or other well-trodden storytelling locales. Since 2020, original programming has had to contend with pandemic-scrambled production schedules, competition from cinematic universes, the boom in streaming platforms, and, most recently, the threat of disappearing from libraries altogether.
A certain video by the comedian Nathan Fielder has never failed to make me laugh. In it, he’s dressed as a pharmacist and prepares a prescription—except instead of pills, he’s using raisins.
Minions! You know them, even if you don’t want to. The banana-yellow, denim-clad, booger-shaped thingamabobs are so popular that they’ve overtaken the film franchise in which they originated. They’ve had their images stitched onto every piece of merchandise possible—sanctioned or not—and probably make up the bulk of those memes your one relative won’t stop posting on Facebook.
This world was not built for the likes of Marcel, the stop-motion-animated minuscule shell who sports pink shoes. Riding in a car makes him vomit repeatedly, unreachable itches make him scream, and typing a single word using a laptop keyboard becomes a full-body workout. Marcel, voiced by the actor and comedian Jenny Slate, can be terribly naive and, given his predilection for corny one-liners, unnervingly candid. (“Guess why I smile a lot?” he observes.
HBO’s Irma Vep, perhaps the most meta show currently on TV, has the kind of high-concept premise that would confuse even its own characters. They’re members of a TV production themselves, but they can’t agree on the nature of what they’re making. One character suggests that they’re creating a long movie broken up into parts—like the way novels used to be published.
Avril Lavigne seemed to baffle music writers in 2002 when she released her first single, the infectious mid-tempo banger “Complicated.” Rolling Stone dubbed her a “tiny terror” with a “nouveau-punk” sound who could be, of all things, “a fine country singer in the making.” Entertainment Weekly breathlessly wondered whether she was “the teen Bob Dylan.
This article contains spoilers for the first seven episodes of Stranger Things Season 4.Only on Netflix’s sci-fi horror drama Stranger Things have teenagers gotten used to fighting interdimensional demons. Early in Season 4, Robin (played by Maya Hawke) offers an explanation for her and her friends’ nonchalance in dealing with threats from the Upside Down, the desolate alternate realm that regularly sets monsters loose.
Early in Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, the heroine has a nightmare. Frances, a college student, dreams that a tooth has come loose in her mouth, leaving a hole that pumps out so much blood, she can’t speak. “The blood tasted thick, clotted and salty,” she recounts. “I could feel it, vividly, running back down my throat.
When the producer Patrick Walters first read the romance comic Heartstopper, he knew it had to be a TV show. There was something about the way the author, Alice Oseman, had illustrated the story that gave him “butterflies,” he told me over Zoom. The characters—a pair of teen boys falling in love—were adorably expressive, all wide eyes and furtive glances captured in fine strokes.
The role of the first lady has long been ill-defined. Until recently, she was the most prominent and therefore scrutinized woman in the White House, yet her position comes with murky expectations. Modern first ladies tend to manage a staff and champion carefully chosen causes, but their duties aren’t formally circumscribed. How many duties are too many? How many are not enough?Showtime’s The First Lady purports to answer those questions.
This article contains spoilers for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The final showdown in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is supposed to be epic. Albus Dumbledore, the mighty wizard played by Jude Law, comes face-to-face with his former lover turned nemesis, Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), breaking the pact they’d made as young men never to fight each other.
In his latest special, Rothaniel, the comedian Jerrod Carmichael doesn’t seem all that interested in getting his audience to laugh—or even in being the star. Rather than emerge from a dressing room backstage, he wanders into New York City’s Blue Note Jazz Club as if he were just passing by, shrugging off his winter coat without fanfare. He takes a seat in a folding chair and grabs a mic, but he doesn’t launch into jokes. Instead, he makes sure the crowd is comfortable.
In his latest special, Rothaniel, the comedian Jerrod Carmichael doesn’t seem all that interested in getting his audience to laugh—or even in being the star. Rather than emerge from a dressing room backstage, he wanders into New York City’s Blue Note Jazz Club as if he were just passing by, shrugging off his winter coat without fanfare. He takes a seat in a folding chair and grabs a mic, but he doesn’t launch into jokes. Instead, he makes sure the crowd is comfortable.
The damage control began not long after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face. After the two exchanged a few words, Rock glanced offscreen and appeared momentarily bewildered. Then he awkwardly tried to lighten the mood before pressing on to present the Best Documentary nominees.The altercation was the most shocking moment in Oscars history—at least for people watching at home. But inside the Dolby Theatre, the show proceeded as if nothing of consequence had happened.
One of the funniest moments in Turning Red lasts about a second at most. Mei, the 13-year-old heroine who shape-shifts into a giant red panda whenever her emotions escape her control, has once again morphed into a flustered fuzz ball when—oh no oh no oh no—she spots her crush. She tries to contain herself, of course. She stomps her feet. She holds her breath.
At the height of her powers, Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the fraudulent blood-testing start-up Theranos, basked in the kind of adulation typically reserved for cult leaders. In one upcoming episode from Hulu’s The Dropout, which dramatizes her saga, Elizabeth (played by Amanda Seyfried) perches on yet another stage, at yet another event about being a female CEO. Her every word scores cheers from the audience of college students, most of them young women.