A computer screen chimes to life. Windows proliferate. Notifications ping. Video-call boxes pop up, tabs multiply, messenger apps ticker endlessly, a stream of bite-size demands for attention. And in the middle of it all, an increasingly frantic, Extremely Online female freelance journalist with money worries and a deadline to meet, …
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“I’ll bet you I can rob a casino,” Allie Fox tells his wife Margot midway through the first season of the Apple TV+ drama The Mosquito Coast. This is a mark both of how desperate their circumstances are and how highly Allie regards his ability to accomplish what others call …
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Derek DelGaudio would like to tell you the truth — an odd thing for an illusionist to say, much less in the beginning of a show. It’s the first clue that something seems unique here. That, and the 690 cards in the lobby, each of which start with the phrase …
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Stephen King has long had his issues with ending his books, which is the downside of writing without outlines and letting the story travel wherever makes sense in the moment. Beginnings, though? Few writers have ever been stronger at them, and few King novels begin better than his 1978 post-apocalyptic …
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Weddings, funerals, Thanksgiving and the rest: These are the occasions that typically bring us together, which must be why The Climb — Michael Angelo Covino’s bristling new comedy — uses them to wedge two men apart. Take the title at face value: Uphill battles are the spine and central pleasure …
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In 1972, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner sent New Journalism titan Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon. While researching the piece, Wolfe fell in love with the stories of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, and instead churned out a four-part series of articles …
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“It’s alright to stretch the word of the Lord sometimes,” admits God-fearing, fire-breathing abolitionist John Brown (Ethan Hawke) in The Good Lord Bird. It’s an approach the darkly comic miniseries takes towards matters historical as well as religious, as each episode opens with the disclaimer: “All of this is true. …
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The first thing you notice about Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) are their faces. They are young, relatively innocent faces, wide open to us but hidden from their schoolmates. They only light up when they’re looking at each other, as if trading glances is how they get through …
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Before he became a cynical parody of himself, director Michael Bay made an efficient 1995 feature debut with Bad Boys, a buddy-cop flick that came in hot on the star power of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami detectives who never learned how to play by the rules. By …
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A tale of a disruptor that hit American airwaves five days before our current Dismantler-in-Chief was sworn into office, The Young Pope was one of the great vulgaris maximus guilty pleasures of 2017. You came for Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII, the smoking hot pontiff who attempted to drag …
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