The Video Music Awards, your yearly reminder that MTV does in fact continue to play music videos, are scheduled for August 20, when we’ll see Cardi B, Beyoncé, JAY-Z, Bruno Mars, Drake, Childish Gambino, and more compete for Moonpeople and bragging rights. The complete list of nominations is now out, with The Carters…

A belated spin-off of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s caper comedies (minus the earlier films’ wit, chemistry, and style), Ocean’s 8 could learn a thing or two about brevity and craft: It belabors the basic plot points Ocean’s 11 dispatched with a single cut or smirk, the result a hacky imitation of the series’ glitzy…

The world’s most expensive costume party was held in New York City last night, as musicians, actors, models, and assorted rich, skinny people gathered at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art by invitation of Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine for the annual Met Gala. This year, attendees placed their bets on Pope Francis’…

As she’s demonstrated time and time again in her music videos, don’t fuck with Rihanna or she will destroy you—or your stock prices, or the case may be. The Los Angeles Times reports that Snapchat shares have fallen nearly 5 percent today after Rihanna called out the Los Angeles-based company, criticizing it for an…

As promised by yesterday’s trailer for the trailer, this morning Warner Bros. released the first official trailer for the upcoming all-female (well, mostly female—hi, James Corden) heist flick Ocean’s 8. The trailer opens with Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) at her parole hearing, saying that, if given another chance at…

Whatever one may think of Luc Besson’s futuristic space opera Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, the idea of spending a cool $225 million so that Rihanna can mount a stripper pole and recite some lines from the poet Paul Verlaine’s “A Poor Young Shepherd” to an audience of one (in full high-tech space suit,…

Here’s some surprising news for 2017: It turns out that good things actually can happen, but only if everybody involved is really cool and talented. Today’s good thing is that Netflix has actually picked up some kind of con artist movie starring Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o, with Selma’s Ava DuVernay directing and …

Thanks in large part to the influence of R&B, electronic music, and hip-hop, pop music of the past decade or so has been wildly experimental, artistically rich stuff. Many of the best artists have blurred these genres to the point where they’re unrecognizable, like, say, Rihanna, whose Anti was one of last year’s most…

“It’s hard to be lonely.” Truer words have never been spoken by Norman Bates. But as he explains to Marion Crane, the dangerous part of that loneliness is the little private trap you can build for yourself in an effort to avoid the isolation. “Once you care about someone, it rules you,” he says, and while it might be…

“Sometimes I see mother when she’s not really there. Sometimes I become her.” These words are a simple statement of fact about the lead character of Bates Motel, but coming from Norman Bates, they’re a revelation. Not since his time in treatment at Pineview last season has Norman been so confronted by the truth of his…

Starting tonight, the A&E series Bates Motel will have one of the most recognizable names in pop music checking in to its murderous narrative. Guest star Rihanna is appearing for a two-episode arc, and it’s one that, for the first time, directly connects the series with its cinematic forerunner: She’s playing Marion…

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is good at a great many things: Writing gorgeous melodies, selecting odd subject matter for musicals, and providing fodder for Paul F. Tompkins’ impressions. But despite having judged several reality TV talent competitions, Webber’s eye for spotting future stars isn’t entirely fine-tuned. The…

Lest you thought her reign would be curtailed, Beyoncé collected the most Grammy nominations when the honors were announced this morning. She scored nine nods with selections from Lemonade showing up across the pop, rock, and rap sections, and ended up vying for the trifecta of top prizes: Record Of The Year, Song Of…

Last week, it was announced that Taylor Swift will be getting her very own 24-hour cable channel to offset the noise of the failing media. How will Taylor Swift NOW! churn up enough Taylor Swift content to fill a 24-hour cycle? Well, in a bind, they could always just cut to a livestream of Swift swimming Scrooge…

The enigmatic French filmmaker Leos Carax started young, unveiling his idiosyncratic, imaginative debut, Boy Meets Girl, when he was all of 23. But in three decades since, he’s only completed four more features: the romanticized noir riff Mauvais Sang; The Lovers On The Bridge, which was at one point the most…