Over the course of the last thirteen years, fans have watched the gang from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia slowly destroy themselves with drugs, alcohol, and outlandish antics. It seems each successive season ups the ante on how much damage Charlie, Mac, Dennis, Dee, and Frank are willing to inflict on their brains…
There’s nothing innovative or remarkable about The Good Cop, which, for a Netflix series, almost becomes remarkable in and of itself. The series’ mundanity—especially enhanced by sharing a release date with the delightfully strange Maniac—feels out of place on the prolific streaming service, instead playing more like…
On Sunday, we got a glimpse of what Joaquin Phoenix will look like as the Joker in Todd Phillips’ Joker, which as a reminder, has pretty much nothing to do with Jared Leto’s Joker. In that image, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker looked a lot like Joaquin Phoenix. The caption read “Arthur.”
This week’s question comes from our film editor, A.A. Dowd:
Songwriter Allee Willis says there’s no real significance to the date that Maurice White reminisces upon in the first line of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September”; “the 21st night of September” just fit the towering funk jam. Little did Willis or White expect that they’d be forever circling a square on the pop-culture…
As you may have heard or observed for yourself, the fifth season of BoJack Horseman is unsurprisingly excellent. Unsurprisingly is the right word there, yes? At this point, we’re all aware that the cartoon show about the talking horse is very good, particularly on lots of fraught, emotionally dense issues, yes? That’s…
Twenty years ago, long before professional poker became the main staple of late-night ESPN programming, the movie Rounders hit theaters. It did alright at the box office, but would go on to become a cult classic among the type of college-aged dudes who only own three movies and one of them is definitely Fight Club.…
Marvel’s X-Men line is about to go through another rehaul with Uncanny X-Men returning as a weekly series in November, but hopefully the end of this recent color-coded phase doesn’t mean the end of Tom Taylor, Carmen Carnero, and Rain Beredo’s X-Men Red. The solicitation for December’s issue #11 reads a lot like a…
Episode 1: “The Chosen One!” | Episode 2: “Windmills” | Episode 3: “Having a Day” | Episode 4: “Furs by Sebastian” | Episode 5: “Exactly Like You” | Episode 6: “Larger Structural Issues” | Episode 7: “Ceci N’est Pas Une Drill” | Episode 8: “The Lake of the Clouds” | Episode 9: “Utangatta” | Episode 10: “Option C”
The first trailer for the upcoming Captain Marvel excited the internet for plenty of reasons. It has the talented Brie Larson doing superhero stuff; it shows a beloved comic book character adapted for the big screen; it finally gives a woman a starring role in one of the bazillion Marvel movies dominated by dudes—and,…
Whatever the flaws of Dietland’s first season—and there were flaws—AMC’s ambitious, intriguing series was a welcome presence. It told a story, adapted from Sarai Walker’s book of the same name, about a woman and her body that didn’t focus on self-control or finding love despite who you are. Instead, Dietland dwelled…
This is the first episode of Maniac where I really feel like I have a firm handle on the tone: This is a dark comedy, through and through, starting from the beginning moments of the episode when one of the orderlies tells the drug trial subjects, “You waived ethics on your consent form.” (Oops!) It’s not that it…
Kit Harington’s performance as Jon Snow has been one of the anchors of Game Of Thrones, slowly tracing the journey of a brooding, magnetic bastard-son from exile into death and finally into the arms of, um, his sister. (It’s a fucked-up show.) One consistent aspect of his performance, aside from being sort of grouchy…
Alec Baldwin and Lorne Michaels both teased that the former would return to play Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live’s upcoming 44th season, which will presumably be every bit as filled with furrowed brows and “ew, I just ate something yucky” faces as its last.
The second episode of Maniac picks up parallel to the first, tracking the events that led Annie to the drug trial where the primary action of the series starts. Is there a reason these two episodes are separate, rather than weaving Annie and Owen’s lives together? By the end of “Windmills,” I’d forgotten why I cared…
How do you make the launch of a new superhero comic imprint a pop culture event? For DC’s Black Label, the answer is Batman’s exposed penis, swinging out of the shadows to highlight the freedom allowed to the creative team of Batman: Damned. Writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo give readers full-frontal Dark…
The Handmaid’s Tale, a Margaret Atwood book turned popular TV show, depicts a dystopian future in which a totalitarian theocracy controls every aspect of women’s lives. It is nearly relentless in its portrayal of inhumane horrors. It also features women wearing red cloaks and white hoods that have entered modern pop…
Not everything is as it seems, but some things are.
Smallfoot opens with a blast of narrated exposition from Migo (Channing Tatum), an enthusiastic Yeti who essentially pitches the movie that’s about to unfold. Migo explains that he’s a resident of a snowy mountain village whose residents have a belief system, carved in stone, that forbids them from dipping below the…
Piano & A Microphone 1983 is an unpolished Prince gem, while Metric loses focus on Air Of Doubt, and Lonnie Holley is louder than ever on Mith. Plus, we take a look at Carrie Underwood’s sixth LP, Cry Pretty.
