Shirley Li

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.

The Philip Guston retrospective was supposed to be one of 2020’s blockbuster art shows. The exhibition would have been the first in 15 years to examine the celebrated artist’s catalog, bringing hundreds of provocative paintings to four prestigious stops: the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Tate Modern in London; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. It felt topical and exciting.

Early in its fourth season, The Crown finds Britain at a low. It’s 1982, and the so-called , but the 2006 drama covers the aftermath of Diana’s death, sympathizing with Elizabeth as she learns to change her perspective on public opinion. In this season, he’s less generous with the Queen, showing how her rigid adherence to duty contributed as much to Charles and Diana’s crumbling marriage as the young couple’s affairs and incompatibility did.

Given the ongoing nature of the pandemic, it may seem senseless to make a two-hour film that looks back on how the coronavirus ran rampant in the U.S. And yet, Totally Under Control—from the Oscar-winning writer-director Alex Gibney and his co-directors, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger—not only documents the chaos of 2020 with clear-eyed precision, but also successfully argues for its own existence.

Late in Netflix’s Emily in Paris, the new comedy series from Sex and the City’s creator, Darren Star, Emily (Lily Collins), the titular American expat, tries to give herself a reality check about her new home. “It’s just Paris,” she says. “It’s not some alternate universe where rules don’t apply.”Oh, but Emily does live in an alternate universe, one built by Star for his first Millennial protagonist.

Almost as soon as Serena Lyn stepped back inside the Magic Kingdom, she burst into tears. It’d been four months since the theme park and crown jewel of Walt Disney World’s Florida stronghold had shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before the parks closed, Lyn had been visiting them twice a week; it was part of her job as a Disney blogger and an Instagrammer with more than 71,000 followers.

Last night’s BET Awards made it immediately clear, with its first performance, that it wouldn’t be a regular awards show—and not just because it had to be put together remotely. Rather than opening with a nominated star debuting a new song or having its host, the comedian Amanda Seales, kick things off with a monologue, the three-hour ceremony began with the 12-year-old gospel singer Keedron Bryant belting out his viral ballad, “I Just Wanna Live.

In a world of social distancing, touching can be a turnoff—even on-screen. With productions being allowed to resume in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and abroad, industry guilds and labor unions have drafted proposals for new on-set safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic. A common recommendation? Limit the amount of time actors have to closely interact.That’s an issue for intimacy coordinators, people whose jobs are dependent on, well, intimacy.

I arrive at the Paramount Drive-In Theater two and a half hours before its first screening, but it appears I’m already late: Ahead of me, a line of cars has formed, ranging from sedans like mine to pickup trucks loaded with blankets and pillows in the back, all inching toward the entrance.