Arts & Culture

Boo! A Madea Halloween was the number-one movie over this past weekend, baffling Hollywood once again and making the Hotep crowd pissed that a movie starring a black guy in a dress made more money than alleged rapist Nate Parker’s still-struggling The Birth of a Nation. (Meanwhile, these woke brothas…

At what point do we stop looking at a show like Black Mirror as a sign of things to come and start acknowledging it as a reflection of where we already are? All the Terminators and 2001s in the world couldn’t prevent us from lusting after self-driving cars, asking Siri…

Right now, Disney XD is probably best known for its increasingly relevant Star Wars Rebels series, as well as for being the only cable channel with an emoticon in its name — at least until the inevitable debut of the Trump 🙁 Channel. Disney XD is also on probation with…

It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…

A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…

I’m not afraid to admit that I get a kick out of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers. Yes, they’re indifferently plotted and predictably written. But I’m a sucker for ludicrous, centuries-spanning conspiracies and indulgent faux-gnosticism. The books serve, if nothing else, as gripping tours through art-world apocrypha, and Brown’s know-it-all…

The wooden troll figures that Thomas Dam began carving and selling in the ’50s had a great deal of folklore behind them but no cast of fixed characters. Though the Trolls have since been in TV specials, video games, and a short-lived series, none of those have established what we…

“Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear?” asks a conservationist late in Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson’s propulsive ivory-trade doc. That simple question cuts to the heart in ways that much of this showy, desperately dramatic pseudo-thriller doesn’t. The title is…

Netflix’s The Crown, a drama series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, is the kind of sumptuous but tasteful British royals porn you’d expect from Ye Olde Masterpiece Theatre, not from the streaming giant that gave us BoJack Horseman and Stranger Things. A $130 million joint American/British…

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a film at war with itself. Which makes perfect sense, because it’s about a man at war with himself, and I’m pretty sure it was also made by a man at war with himself. The true-life story of Desmond Doss — a Seventh Day Adventist…

Aisholpan Nurgaiv has never met this eagle she’s posing with — borrowed from a local animal wrangler — on a balcony at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. In 90-degree heat, she’s a 15-year-old girl sweating in her Mongolian winter clothes, including a hat made from the first fox she…

With films like Take Shelter, Mud and even this spring’s somewhat uneven Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols has steadily built a filmography of terse beauty. With Loving, he tackles the kind of boldface subject matter that Oscar season feeds on: It’s a historical drama about the 1967 Supreme Court decision that…

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