Arts Reviews

At a time when most streaming shows front-load their first episode with all the drama, intrigue and titillation so that the audience will keep on watching, the opening of Steven Zaillian’s Ripley is almost comically counterintuitive. We see Andrew Scott’s Tom Ripley lugging a corpse down a flight of stairs, without explanation as to who he is or who his victim is, and then we begin the series proper, filmed (by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswitt) in crisp black and white. Over the course of eight episodes, Zaillian follows Highsmith’s first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, reasonably closely, albeit with ornamentations and digressions. But if you had any expectation that this would be an edge-of-seat thriller, well, think again.

When you tire of trying to find the humor in The Regime, HBO’s new satire set in an unnamed “middle European” country, you can keep yourself occupied by trying to identify all of the historical references. The series was shot in Austria and the interiors have a dilapidated imperial feel, so perhaps we’re meant to think of one of the Visegrád countries — Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary — that inherited the heartlands of the Habsburg monarchy. The government, however, is led by a capricious and occasionally brutal authoritarian. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, often called Europe’s last dictator, immediately comes to mind. Chancellor Elena Vernham, played by Kate Winslet, is said to have studied medicine in Paris.

In December, I stumbled upon a new AI tool called Suno. The press release and a few fawning articles claimed that in under 30 seconds, it could a make a catchy, compelling song based on your prompt. It couldn’t.  Sure, it made songs, but they were uncomfortably awkward, the lyrics didn’t make any sense and you couldn’t listen to them without feeling deeply uncomfortable. I tried a country song about gay love, and it’s like a bad mirror of what a real song could be. I logged off Suno and didn’t think much about it again. But this month, Rolling Stone wrote a feature on the company and some of their sample songs using Suno’s new version 3 model sounded eerily real —  namely "Soul Of The Machine.

If I could be like anybody, I would wish to be like Peter Duchin. The pianist and bandleader — who, each year during his prime, oversaw from his perch at the piano dozens of debutante balls and scores of society events — has always seemed to me to embody style, dignity and grace.  Arguably Duchin came by some of these qualities as a consequence of his heritage — his father was the equally famous bandleader Eddy Duchin — but it has always been obvious that he must have worked hard at them, too. He had certainly had his share of reversals: his mother, the former Marjorie Oelrichs, succumbed to complications experienced during childbirth; about thirteen years later, his father was felled by leukemia. He was raised in large part by diplomat W.

There is a magical nexus between awful and amazing on which some movies land. Sometimes it is a self-aware reach toward the awful that creates the magic, other times it is the filmmaker’s obliviousness that creates a Bob Ross happy accident that delights viewers and creates a cult classic. Amazon’s Road House is not such a movie. The 2024 film, loosely based on 1989’s Road House, mostly adheres to the Wikipedia plot summary of the Patrick Swayze classic, if you forgive them for forgetting to make the plot discernible. Jake Gyllenhaal is a former UFC fighter, rather than a professional bouncer, in this iteration. He is recruited to become a bouncer for a club experiencing a wave of violence, as was the case in the original. He is a badass, as Swayze was.

Stormy Daniels isn’t just a porn star. At the time news broke of her affair with Donald Trump, she was a businesswoman, writer and a prolific director in the adult entertainment industry — talk about smashing the glass ceiling. According to Daniels, she was even complimented by Trump for her towering intellect the night they first met in his hotel room.  All of this feminist heroism — and more — was revealed in Daniels’s new documentary Stormy, which was released on Peacock Monday morning. The documentary chronicles Daniels’s affair with Trump, the hush money payments made during the 2016 election and life after becoming infamous.

The greatest show of the "new” TV era is probably Better Call Saul. It’s introspective and cynical and novelistic — and even the “good guys” aren't good guys; they’re just flawed rather than evil. Among those who’ve sold their souls, and others who never had them, our charming lead, Jimmy McGill is working to get his back, having pawned it off. It’s the best storytelling and characterization that the current style of TV can produce, and a triumph for the medium. Masters of the Air is a very different beast. It has the young rising talent of today — notably, Austin Butler and his Elvis voice, alongside Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan and the always excellent Callum Turner — and a bloated 2020s TV budget.

For the last few years, Betsy Aidem has immersed herself in historical trauma. In 2022, the Broadway powerhouse starred in Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning play, which follows the lives of a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century.  The same year, she took on a part in a similar vein: that of the feisty Marcelle in Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, which ended its Broadway run on March 3. The action flits between 2016 France, when antisemitism is on the rise and the far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen is gaining traction as a presidential candidate; and the 1940s, when Marcelle’s grandparents hide from the Nazis in their Parisian apartment.

It looked like it was finally going to happen. At last night's Academy Awards, after a fun back-and-forth with Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling — who stars with her as a stuntman character in this year’s The Fall Guy — said “We’re here to celebrate the stunt community. They’ve been such a crucial part of our industry, since the beginning of cinema.” In a subsequent video, narrated by Gosling, paid tribute to the best of stunts work for the past hundred years, showing clips from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to John Wick, Fast & The Furious, RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and more.

The Academy Awards are a strange affair. Last year, they ignored Tár, a brilliant film that will be remembered as long as cinema exists, in favor of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an over-excitable picture that barely deserves to linger in the memory as long as you can recite its unmemorable name. But the nature of awards is that its directors — the Daniels! — are now Oscar-winning filmmakers, and so score above Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fincher and the rest. Anyway, we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, yet soon, that will no longer be the case.

This Sunday, the annual orgy of back-slapping, expensive frocks, frenzied behind-the-scenes campaigning and self-promotion will finally climax with the 96th Academy Awards, taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The ceremony itself is perhaps the most predictable and consequently least exciting for years. Barring an upset of unimaginable proportions, Oppenheimer will win Best Film and Best Director, and its co-star Robert Downey Jr. will win Best Supporting Actor — a popular award for a popular figure — and Da’Vine Joy Randolph will win Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers.

At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.  In the second half of this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Paul and his mother, Jessica, have escaped the initial assault on House Atreides to shelter with Fremen insurgents, but Harkonnen death squads pursue them.

Since the vast success of Game of Thrones, every streaming service has tried its best to come up with an epic series that will be held in the same estimation as the earlier seasons of Thrones. (The HBO flagship drama's rise was rivaled only by the rightful contempt in which the final series is still held, which one day will be the subject of a genuinely jaw-dropping long read or book.) There have been some close calls (House of the Dragon, Outlander), some misses (Lord of the Rings) and a couple of outright horrors; I doubt that you could pay me, or anyone else, to sit through the diabolical Wheel of Time again. But now Hulu has finally joined the action, with an apparently unlimited budget, to adapt James Clavell’s much-beloved bestselling 1975 novel Shōgun over ten episodes.

There is a strange rule in contemporary Hollywood that filmmakers ignore at their peril: biopics might be a popular dramatic form for directors, but they tend to be of little interest to audiences. In the past year alone, the likes of Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro and Golda have all under-performed commercially, demonstrating that however accomplished the filmmaker (including the Oscar-nominated likes of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Bradley Cooper), it is nearly always a non-starter to attempt to persuade viewers to spend their $15 on watching someone’s life story for two hours at the cinema. Oppenheimer proved to be a rare exception — though that’s far from the only way in which Christopher Nolan is exceptional.