Arts & Culture

It’s funny, it’s colorful, it’s got cool music.

This piece has spoilers for the first six episodes of the second season of Stranger Things.

South Park airs on Comedy Central Last year, just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told a reporter that the next season of their show wouldn’t take aim at Trump, because “satire has become reality.” After 20 years of…

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix Joan Didion has set an impossible standard for any documentarian who would want to cover her life. She’s essentially already done it herself, brilliantly, in her essays, novels and films. Still, Didion’s nephew, actor/director Griffin Dunne, takes a…

When I first saw Brett Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, I was shocked that the film somehow matched the rollicking, mercurial energy of its subject, producer Robert Evans. Morgen reimagined the use of archival footage and voiceover, and the style he pioneered has now been mimicked…

The numbers in the title of 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene refer to the number of setups and shots that were required to create the shocking cinematic savagery that occurs less than an hour into the director’s 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. You know the scene: It killed off star Janet Leigh’s character…

One of Us premiered October 20 on Netflix New Yorkers will immediately recognize the opening shots of One of Us, the new documentary from Jesus Camp filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady: ultra-Orthodox Jewish families roaming the big city, the women and girls in skirts and tights, the men and…

The Opposition airs weeknights on Comedy Central In the first episode of Comedy Central’s new nightly satirical late-night series The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, the host explains why he jumped ship from The Daily Show, where he’d been a correspondent since 2015. The Jordan Klepper who cocked his eyebrow through…

For all his reputation as a capital-A Auteur, Todd Haynes has always demonstrated impressive stylistic versatility. The Sirkian pastiche of Far from Heaven is a far cry from the lo-fi expressionism of Poison, and the music video wonderland of Velvet Goldmine has relatively little in common with the fractured minimalism…

Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer. It was one of the most divisive titles at this year’s Cannes festival, thanks…

Maybe it’s encouraging, in a way, that an America in crisis struggles so mightily to make crowd-pleasing war movies. Whatever their politics, no studio exec today would let a wide-release desert-war drama come right out and say what even the GOP increasingly admits: that Iraq was a mistake, that Afghanistan has…

This fall, mainstream films are subverting expectations all over the place. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! proved too much for some audiences looking for a moody drama who were then shocked by gory, allegorical narrative. Blade Runner 2049 sloughed off most of its predecessor’s lower-brow populist action for a somber tone and…