Arts Reviews

Who did you cheer for in the Super Bowl last night? The asteroid? Evan McMullin? (OK, let’s not go too crazy.) Rarely has a third-party option looked so good. This was one of the least appealing Super Bowl match-ups in NFL history—and it’s the second time these two teams have met in a championship game in just three years. In one corner, football’s new dynasty, the Kansas City Chiefs, like the New England Patriots of yesteryear except everyone has a make-up artist on retainer. The Chiefs might play on the wind-swept plains but they’ve imported Hollywood into the NFL like never before.

Jet lagged, frozen, wrapped in multiple layers against the polar winds of a New York January storm, it was a thrill to walk into a gallery space full of sun-drenched summer scenes. At first glance, these are beautiful paintings of beautiful young people on beaches, but look again and you realize they are a meditation on the fragility of body image and how illusory perfection is. This is a topic Emil Sands is uniquely qualified to portray — more on that later. But first, the paintings: a longer look reveals that the beaches are serving as stage sets and mindscapes for an exploration of vulnerability and exposure — an experience intrinsically tied to the act of sharing space with other near-naked bodies.

We’re well into awards season, ladies and gentlemen, and though the Oscars always garner the most attention, and the Emmys cover the streaming entertainment Americans actually watch, the Grammys have always been among the most controversial awards shows.   The National Recording Academy hasn’t always been up to speed on what musicians are the most influential and deserving. With the Grammys, it seems the mood isn’t excitement about who will win, but anticipatory annoyance at who will be snubbed.   This year’s show was a little different though. Rising stars got the stage, for performances and trophies, and the biggest awards were apologies for the previously snubbed.  And so we get the Best Album of the Year, handed to Beyoncé for her country record, Cowboy Carter.

Had the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Flight Risk, which topped the US box office last weekend with a modest but far from disastrous $12 million gross, been directed by most competent journeymen filmmakers, then it would have been a case of job done, box ticked and onto the next project. If you were told, however, that it was made by an Oscar-winning filmmaker whose previous movies have been large-scale dramatic epics — and who, frankly, would have done a far more interesting job with The Brutalist, although its overtly Jewish themes may have given him considerable difficulty — then the first question most people would ask is “Why?” And then when you’re told the director in question is Mel Gibson, the response is usually “Ah” and “Oh.

On its surface, “corporate art” is comforting and accessible. It’s bright, friendly and visually simple, featuring flat cartoon vector people — with their bendy arms and odd proportions — who are jumping, dancing, reading or running. They’re always happy. Always. This art is used in every HR manual, charity about-us page, Facebook help section and LinkedIn jobs application. It’s uniform, indistinct, impersonal and insincere. The more you see it, the more you start feeling unsettled. Severance, the Apple TV+ sci-fi office thriller show from Ben Stiller, leans into that discomfort. The managers at Lumon Industries have perfectly clipped hair and overly broad smiles with flashy grins. Their white-wall offices are clean and organized, accented with single-color carpets.

This year’s Oscar nominations were always going to be more low-key than usual, overshadowed as they inevitably have been both by the fires in Los Angeles — which has led to repeated delays in their announcement — and by Donald Trump’s inauguration, the after-effects of which are still rippling in Hollywood circles days later. It was therefore amusing to see that The Apprentice, the highly controversial biopic of the young Trump, has been Oscar-nominated for two of its actors, Sebastian Stan as Trump and the much-admired Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn. Strong faces quite a challenge in the Best Supporting Actor from, among others, his Succession co-star Kieran Culkin, who is widely tipped to win for his performance in A Real Pain.

The Robbie Williams biopic Better Man opened in American theaters last weekend and, as every single box office commentator predicted, it flopped, and flopped hard. A gross of just over $1 million in its opening three days — less than the Golden Globe-winning The Brutalist, which is only showing on sixty-eight screens nationwide — is utterly disastrous, all the more so because this wasn’t a $10 million indie, or even a $40 million Rocketman, but a movie that it cost $110 million to make.

Regardless of what you made of the winners, 2024’s Golden Globes ceremony has gone down in infamy as one of the very worst in its history, entirely due to its terrible host Jo Koy. He was justly ridiculed for his incompetent, weirdly aggressive hosting style, and so the onus was on this year’s compère Nikki Glazer to bring basic professionalism back to the event as much as humor and slickness.

You may, or may not, be planning on seeing the third film in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise when it is released this Christmas, but whether or not your taste for CGI pugnacious animals encompasses this latest cash-in for the Nintendo character, the presence of Jim Carrey should provide some distraction. Carrey is playing the villainous Dr. Robotnik for the third time, and has been offering some amusingly candid comments in interviews about his decision to return to the role. He announced that he came back to this film’s universe for two reasons, “first of all, I get to play a genius, which is a bit of a stretch” and “I bought a lot of stuff, and I need the money, frankly.

To say superhero films are in a rut is to understate how bad a state they're in. Deadpool 3 was underwhelming, yet it was still the only superhero film released this year that wasn't terrible. Its competition? Venom 3, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Joker: Folie à Deux.  2023 was a bit better, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both being genuinely great. But otherwise? Ant-Man 3 was unwatchable. The Flash was horrific. The Marvels was aneurysm-inducing. Shazam! 2 was utterly forgettable. I did actually forget that Blue Beetle existed until I started writing this list. Oh yeah, and there was another Aquaman movie. It, like most of the films listed here, flopped.

The Anglophiles reading this will know that the Carry On series represents some of the very best of British humor — or, alternatively, the very worst. The jokes were broad and basic, the stereotypes egregious and the production values negligible. Nonetheless, for the two decades that the series continued to attract viewers, they were enormously popular films because they did not attempt anything surprising or unpretentious. Instead, millions of viewers enjoyed them because they were just as the title promised — a carry on — with no hidden depths, or shallows.