To describe Saltburn as a sexed-up The Talented Mr. Ripley for millennials would be to reduce this aesthetically and symbolically complex film to a two-bit aphorism, but it’s a good start.
Campy, surreal, and even “trauma”-inducing, the queer world of Gregg Araki’s smart, challenging, and colorfully eccentric films seduce.
Pablo Larraín’s fascist vampire analogy El Conde somehow trivializes the Pinochet monstrosity at its core.
Billy Wilder’s most savage of American comedies, The Apartment, skewers corporate culture and patriarchal structures while challenging viewers to read its spills and overflows as more than just accidents.
In All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar leverages hyperreality through a camp lens to narrate a story that is as rich in theatricality as it is in the nuanced emotionality of the dream.
The second season of Apple TV’s funny, inventive, and self-indulgent comedy whodunnit The Afterparty is utterly unnecessary in the best way.
There are two Lenny Bruces: 1. the real-life subject of thoughtful documentaries and biographies, and 2. the TV/movie hip mentor and accidental deity.
Tintin is one of the secret engines of 20th Century pop culture in Europe and Hollywood, as shown in these James Bond-like movies for the elementary school crowd.
Through the glow of comfort television, we experience communitas – that feeling of “the lost heaven” of the collective – and, for a time, we are relieved of our existential alienation.
Jaboukie Young-White’s clever wordplay, creative use of metaphor, and engaging storytelling prove he’s adept at applying his perceptive talents to music.
Pee-wee Herman forever lives in a cosmos without a supernatural giver of laws. In such an existentialist world, Nietzsche says, we must be like children and invent a world of meaning, lest we be consumed by the great void.
Barbiecore might be more than a summer phase. The Barbie movie has some women thinking it’s time we rocked the pink in corporate-world fashion.
