Many of this month’s best new books border on the surreal or otherworldly, transporting readers to settings slightly removed from our everyday realities. In Marigold and Rose: A Fiction, Louise Glück narrates the inner lives of two infant twins, who, it turns out, have much the same grasp on the world that adults do. Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs dips a toe into the un…
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At the beginning of House of Tulip, a short documentary directed by Cydney Tucker, we meet Mariah Moore, a transgender rights activist in New Orleans, as she is leading a meeting about life planning, and in particular, about advanced medical directives and making plans for one’s own death. The scene is a reminder that death is always top of mind in the trans community.
House of Tulip is L…
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We’ve become so conditioned by years of watching men fight men onscreen—jabbing with spears, blamming with guns, high-kicking the daylights out of each other with a mighty oof—that, the Amazons of the Wonder Woman movies notwithstanding, it’s a novelty to see women going at it. That’s just one of the pleasures of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s hist…
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Steven Spielberg’s life has always hovered just outside of his films. In E.T. he filtered his feelings about his parents’ divorce through the eyes of a child who meets an alien. He’s wrestled with questions of fatherhood and familial guilt in everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to A.I. to Catch Me If You Can. His talent has been the s…
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided not to revoke actor Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category, following an investigation into whether aggressive campaigning from her Hollywood peers helped her secure the nod. Riseborough’s nomination prompted extra scrutiny from the Academy after public backlash following its announcement, with c…
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The last time the Writers Guild of America went on strike, in 2007, workers pushed back against the nascent streaming industry, advocating for higher residual payments for content released over streaming. Now a new technology, artificial intelligence, stands to drastically change Hollywood again as Guild strikers return to the picket line.
Streaming giants like Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ …
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No year-end best-movie list is definitive, because no year of moviegoing experience can be reduced to bullet points—nor should it be. Particularly now, when we can watch so many new movies without leaving our homes, the experience of watching has changed drastically, and in ways we may never be able to fully reckon with. When you finish watching a movie at home, you may still be thinking abou…
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Commercial fishing and my career in Hollywood are forever joined. I grew up in the seaport of New Bedford, Mass. It is also the primary location in my current film Finestkind. Oscar Helgeland, my Norwegian-born grandfather, moved there after the Stock Market Crash in 1929 put an abrupt end to his career as the captain of a wealthy Manhattanite’s Hudson River-based yacht. The story of…
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In 2021, sorority rush season at the University of Alabama enraptured viewers on TikTok as potential new members (called PNMs for short) offered a look behind the scenes at their attempts to join their top-pick houses. During the phenomenon that came to be known on TikTok as Bama Rush, young female students would upload their OOTD (outfit of the day) videos and tell viewers where they purchased…
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