Shirley Li

Steve Martin and Martin Short’s rapport isn’t that of a comedic partnership so much as that of a musical duo. Since their first collaboration more than 30 years ago in Three Amigos, they have developed a natural rhythm: Martin is the straight man with a wise-ass streak; Short produces over-the-top characters with wild facial contortions. Martin gets the audience to laugh with him; Short, to laugh at him. Theirs is a harmony that comedians often dream of developing but rarely achieve.

The opening scenes of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings paint a rich portrait not of the film’s titular hero but of its villain. Played by the Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung, Wenwu (a.k.a. the Mandarin) is the owner of the magical Ten Rings. As such, he’s an immortal man burdened with, as the saying goes, the great responsibility that comes with great power.

Reservation Dogs wears its pop-culture influences proudly, and not just in its title. FX’s new comedy series abounds with cinephilic homages: A paintball shoot-out in the pilot ends with an absurd remake of a scene from Platoon. The four teenage protagonists suit up like the thieves in Reservoir Dogs, their gang’s namesake. One of the characters is even named Elora Danan, after the baby in the cult fantasy film Willow.

Four minutes for Flag Day. Five minutes for Aline. Nine minutes for The French Dispatch.The Cannes Film Festival, which concludes today, has long held an unusual reputation for its lengthy standing ovations. The tradition—which perhaps reached an apotheosis when Pan’s Labyrinth received 22 minutes of applause in 2006—has at times attracted mockery.

The weather, often derided as a mundane conversation topic of last resort, has actually been a prolific source of entertainment. Natural disasters drive big-budget blockbusters. Solar power fuels Lorde’s latest single. Double rainbows produced a lasting meme. But is the weather worthy of an entire streaming service?Fox certainly thinks so. This fall, the network is set to launch Fox Weather, a platform for meteorology programming 24/7, rain or shine.

The weather, often derided as a mundane conversation topic of last resort, has actually been a prolific source of entertainment. Natural disasters drive big-budget blockbusters. Solar power fuels Lorde’s latest single. Double rainbows produced a lasting meme. But is the weather worthy of an entire streaming service?Fox certainly thinks so. This fall, the network is set to launch Fox Weather, a platform for meteorology programming 24/7, rain or shine.

When A’ziah King, a.k.a. Zola, a.k.a. @_zolarmoon, hit Send on the first of her 148 tweets about a trip to Florida gone wrong, Twitter was a different place. In 2015, users could publish only 140 characters at a time. A debate about the color of a dress could dominate the platform for a week.

Every Fast and Furious movie strains credulity, but F9 shatters it so completely, even the production’s own characters have noticed. In the ninth main installment of one of Universal’s most durable film franchises, Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) and his trusty band of drag-racing ex-cons are so indestructible that they ride out bullets, land mines, and the void of outer space. (I repeat: Outer. Space.

The creators of Kevin Can F**k Himself have yet to go on the record about this, but they’re clearly tired of lopsided sitcom marriages. The series, with its pointed title, seems to be a roast of shows starring the comedian Kevin James over the years, such as The King of Queens; notably, his characters’ spouses didn’t have lives of their own outside of doting on him. (One even got unceremoniously written out off-screen between the first and second seasons.

This article contains mild spoilers for the first two episodes of Loki.For 13 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built up the Infinity Stones as objects of grand power, capable of manipulating all existence when united. In Avengers: Infinity War, they turned half of the cosmos to dust; in Avengers: Endgame, the surviving heroes chased them down across time. In Loki, the Disney+ series released today, they’re nothing more than colorful paperweights.

Hollywood has a crowded slate of films—delayed by the pandemic and otherwise—to release over the next three months. That makes choosing what to see more stressful than usual, especially when some titles can be seen both in theaters and at home. To make the process more manageable, I’ve scrutinized trailers and even screened some of the films below to put together this guide for all your needs, whatever they may be.

This summer will see the release of a spate of new films, including long-delayed ones. Here are seven to mark on your moviegoing calendar. Then: We send you off with some weekend reads.After more than a year of pandemic-induced delays, Hollywood plans to drop both big-budget franchise flicks and indie stunners this summer.

This story contains spoilers for the film Spiral: From the Book of Saw.Saw, that undying paean to torture porn, finally started running out of stamina when its eighth—eighth!—entry hit theaters in 2017. The once-popular Lionsgate series had gotten predictable; the death traps were rusty, the box-office returns waning. Even B-listers hadn’t joined the cast in years. It needed a new star and a new purpose.As it turned out, the studio could kill two birds with one Chris Rock.

Early in the action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, Angelina Jolie’s character, Hannah, straps on a parachute and hops onto the back of a pickup truck. As the vehicle snakes through the Montana wilderness, she deploys her gear and lifts off, laughing as she glides back down. Hannah’s a smoke jumper—a trained firefighter who drops into wildfires from above—and she’s clearly tough as hell.

Elon Musk is an eyebrow-raising choice of host for Saturday Night Live. He’s a controversy-courting tech CEO with a tenuous connection to the entertainment industry. He’s never seemed interested in performing sketch comedy. And his Twitter following of more than 50 million accounts eclipses SNL’s audience—this season, the series’ highest-rated episode drew about 9 million viewers. Musk, in short, doesn’t need SNL.

When 2020 began, the future of movie theaters looked bright. Seemingly every major Hollywood studio was pursuing its own cinematic universe, and every big-budget film was seeking a sequel. Viewers were promised a slew of surefire hits, including a new Christopher Nolan thriller, Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond, and the next era of Marvel movies. “There’s no way one can say theatrical is dead,” Deadline observed of the year to come.

Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter published a detailed cover story on the veteran film and theater producer Scott Rudin’s alleged mistreatment of his employees. The piece features on-the-record testimonies from former staffers and a slew of accusations describing physical assaults, traumatizing outbursts, unreasonable demands, and a penchant for throwing things.

In Godzilla vs. Kong, the plot is just an excuse to get to the titular brawl. The film follows a team traveling to Hollow Earth—the secret underground home of titans such as Godzilla and Kong—on behalf of a shady corporation seeking to harness its energy source. They transport Kong away from Skull Island so that he can guide them on their quest, but, uh-oh, Kong and Godzilla are ancient rivals, and, oh no, two apex predators can’t exist at the same time.

To be a fan of The Bachelor is to accept a set of contradictions. It professes to help people find true love, but via artificial means. Contestants will say they’re on the show “for the right reasons,” but later admit to non-romantic motives or bristle at the thought of getting engaged. It implies that love is universal by casting a wide net for suitors, but it didn’t feature a Black lead until Matt James became the Bachelor this year.

The film’s official title is Zack Snyder’s Justice League. So when Zack Snyder popped up on the video screen during an HBO Max–hosted virtual watch party last night, the fans went wild—as wild as they could in a chat box, anyway. “This movie is a masterpiece,” a commenter wrote before the film started playing. “Zack I respect you so much,” another gushed.

The film’s official title is Zack Snyder’s Justice League. So when Zack Snyder popped up on the video screen during an HBO Max–hosted virtual watch party last night, the fans went wild—as wild as they could in a chat box, anyway. “This movie is a masterpiece,” a commenter wrote before the film started playing. “Zack I respect you so much,” another gushed.

Fantasy worlds that mirror real-life cultures have a long history in storytelling. Middle-earth, the Four Lands, Narnia, Westeros, Earthsea: These are fictional places populated by imaginary creatures and characters, but with politics, faiths, and cultural dynamics that resemble our own. They give their creators license to world-build with allegories for contemporary issues, but without worrying too much about fidelity to reality.

This story contains spoilers for all of WandaVision.Within minutes of WandaVision’s finale dropping on Disney+ this morning, my Twitter timeline began to fill with questions about what the ending meant. After a few hours, YouTubers started posting breakdowns of what viewers might have missed.

When Taylor Swift, the pandemic’s most productive pop star, announced that she’d be re-recording her albums in a push for ownership over her work, the venture sounded risky. Swift cast her decision as both a personal vendetta against the music executive Scooter Braun and a moralistic stand against the industry’s treatment of artists. But at face value, re-recordings seem to offer little to look forward to for listeners.

Saturday Night Live wants you to know that it’s still fun. “Trust me when I say this: It has only been good here at SNL,” the host, Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy, said in his monologue, without a hint of irony. Given the state of the world, that’s a dangerous statement to make: The show has been through a turbulent year of struggling to find humor in definitively not-good times, Dan Levy.

Some of the most bittersweet, beautiful moments in cinema history have come from rambling, difficult-to-watch lovers’ spats. Quarrels can illuminate the rot in a relationship, and panning one of his films. Malcolm & Marie is akin to watching two sentient think pieces scream at each other. The self-indulgence of the script takes up so much air, it’s a small miracle that Washington and Zendaya don’t disappear.

This story contains spoilers for Bridgerton and Dickinson.In the Netflix series Bridgerton, everyone reads the pamphlets written by the pseudonymous “Lady Whistledown,” Regency England’s answer to Gossip Girl. Each issue targets the wealthiest and most powerful residents of London in 1813, revealing something new about the city’s high-society ecosystem.

This story contains mild spoilers for the first three episodes of WandaVision.After 23 films, even a casual Marvel fan knows what it means to be an Avenger: fighting for those who can’t, against any threat, be it corporate greed or the surveillance state or a purple alien. Yet, in the series WandaVision, which premiered yesterday on Disney+, one of these storied Avengers rejects her duty in the second episode.

In the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder, Tom Cruise stole scenes by mocking Hollywood’s entitlement. As the cocksure, foulmouthed studio exec Les Grossman, Cruise put on a fat suit, wore heavy prosthetics, and peppered his lines with profanity. When a gang holding his cast hostage demands ransom, he doesn’t bother to listen to the specifics. Instead, he threatens the kidnappers by promising to “rain down an ungodly fucking firestorm.”Cruise’s outburst on the U.K.

In 2020, TV became essential. With the closures of sports stadiums, concert halls, and movie theaters, the only stage fit for the pandemic turned out to be the small screen. And for those of us who could afford to spare time for such storytelling, TV took us to places where we could find some reprieve, whether in the form of a pulse-pounding mystery, a gut-wrenching romance, an endearing fish-out-of-water comedy, or a mind-boggling docuseries.