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Pursed lips, eye-squints and a nasally groan. Jennifer Coolidge, best known for playing Stifler’s mom in American Pie, is a recognizable face on the silver screen, but until recently she'd found herself relegated to the background. Over the last few years, however, we have seen a Jenaissance. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s what people are calling Jennifer Coolidge’s epic return after not one but two recent breakout roles that have even seen her win an Emmy.

The first season of The White Lotus opens with a coffin being loaded onto a plane. In the second, a beachgoer discovers several bodies bobbing like croutons in the topaz Sicilian sea. Each season of HBO's hit series is set in a fictional, titular hotel chain whose recreationally wealthy guests spat to pointless deaths — the perfect framing for an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery. Instead, showrunner Mike White uses the form for rollicking melodrama that blends an absurdist comedy of manners with a class satire. As a viewer, you can vicariously enjoy a luxurious getaway while relieving your envy by mocking those who can actually afford it.

Even if you ignore the endless controversies associated with him, it is undeniably true that Woody Allen has lost his touch. With the partial exceptions of Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine, the director has not made a good film since the early '90s. The last few pictures he's made — Rifkin’s Festival, A Rainy Day In New York, and the like — have been seen by so few people that they seem more like self-indulgent home movies than commercial works. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, announcing his fiftieth film, the Paris-set crime thriller Wasp 22, Allen, at the age of 86, also allegedly said that he expects it will be his last picture. He told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, "My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually didn’t hate the ending of Game of Thrones. Sure, the showrunners fumbled some of the character arcs and made some odd decisions (King Bran? Really?). But the broad thematic arc of the series was perfect. Daenerys’s dark turn into madness and mass murder and the subsequent destruction of the Iron Throne served as a hopeful proclamation that, even in our bloody, jaded, pornified world, the true faith lives on. The show understood, on some level, that neither the ideal redistribution of power nor its unfettered aggrandizement could ever be our salvation. Martin made his name as the anti-Tolkien, but it was all a ruse. If his intentions were truly insidious, his story would “look fairer and feel fouler.

DARE is concerned about Euphoria. The anti-drug campaign put out a PSA recently warning that the show “chooses to misguidedly glorify and erroneously depict high school student drug use, addiction, anonymous sex, violence and other destructive behaviors as common and widespread in today’s world.” Considering the prevalence of drugs (snortable, swallowable, injectible), drug dealers (lovable, despicable), and drug-laced dream sequences on Euphoria, it would seem you can’t blame the group for being concerned. But it’s also hard to watch Euphoria and not think it's a cautionary drama on the dangers of drugs that could have been created by a group like DARE itself.

I am on record as being somewhere between weary and terrified of the threatened arrival of Downton Abbey 2 in our movie theaters imminently. But this is also tinged with sadness. When Julian Fellowes emerged with his screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in 2001, it fizzed with wit and imagination. Now, he has seemingly become the go-to chronicler of English upper-class life, churning out increasingly nonsensical variants on the same story with greatly diminishing returns. So how does he fare when he turns his attention to American upper-class life? The new HBO series The Gilded Age attempts to answer this question. It primarily concerns two New York figures in the 1880s, who are schematically represented as "snobbish Old Money" and "arriviste New Money.

Few filmmakers today have as commanding a presence behind the camera as Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet). He’s one of maybe a handful of auteurs interested in telling thrilling big screen stories in the theater. This past summer, while his film Tenet was being used as an experiment to see if people were ready to return to theaters, studios were making other plans for the future. Nolan, however, does not intend to go down quietly.

There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to appear in domestic-based thrillers. Last Sunday when HBO’s The Undoing began, Jonathan and Grace Fraser (Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) seemed to have the happiest of middle-aged marriages. They still laughed at each other’s jokes. They still kept each other fully informed about the kind of day they’d had at work: he as a kindly child oncologist, she as an unfailingly wise therapist. Not only did they still have sex, but when they did, it wasn’t always in bed.True, they weren’t wholly without their problems. Their loving son Henry, for example, sometimes didn’t clean up after making smoothies.

It’s quite rare for Republicans to get a starring role in the entertainment industry, let alone on an HBO production. The Swamp, a new documentary, is a fascinating exception.The documentary mainly focuses on the bipartisan effort to stop corruption in DC through reforms on issues like party leadership influence, campaign spending, lobbying and executive war power. HBO tells this story mainly through the lenses of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who have their own respective attempts at bipartisan legislative reforms during a partisan impeachment impeachment. But Cockburn wasn’t that taken with the public policy. There are too many humorous moments in the documentary to focus on such tedium. Here are the real highlights.

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

Catherine the Great is the vanity project of star and executive producer Helen Mirren. One way you can tell it's a vanity project is that Mirren is 74 years old while the character she plays — at least at the start of the mini-series — is 33 years old. Now I don't wish to be ungallant. It's certainly true that Mirren has always scrubbed up well. She is a very handsome woman and she knows she is a handsome woman, as reflected by all those films and TV series earlier in her career — not, though, The Queen, as far as I recall — when she appears with her kit off.

The fans had been waiting months to hear the end of the story. It was the only story in town, the only story in every city, in every corner of the nation – the most important story in the world. They were desperate, needy and impatient to know how it ended: they were fans. Rumors said that a boat from England would bring the final installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to America. Crowds of fans gathered at the docks in New York, or perhaps in Boston. It was true. There was a boat. A great hush spread among the crowd. At once the solitary figure of the packet’s captain appeared on deck. As the boat grew ever closer to the shore a dreadful noise began to stir amongst the fans. The captain, overcome with emotion, had tears streaming down his face.

The new season of Veep will show Selina Meyer as a former president. It’s an awkward role at the best of times; George Washington’s model, Cincinnatus, has long since become Davos Man. For a woman, it’s likely to offer particular challenges — and a key element of the show’s genius has always been its consideration of the realities of female leadership. Veep was created by Armando Iannucci as a spin-off from his successful UK comedy, The Thick of It. Veep quickly came into its own, offering a view of the idiosyncrasies of American politics through a thick fog of obscenity and insults. Veep’s Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is not like the hapless, hopeless MPs satirized in The Thick of It.

‘The innocence of America is one of its oldest traditions,’ said Oscar Wilde who, like Michael Jackson, was accused of seducing underage boys. Wilde was convicted, and cast into a disgrace that everyone now agrees was a crime against art and morality. Jackson was able to wriggle out of court, more than once. He had money and he had lawyers but, most of all, he had the entertainment business on his side, moralizing to us that he was a great artist. The pagan cult of show business is the real American religion, and the innocence of children is one of its most lucrative assets. The innocence of Michael Jackson, child star turned child abuser, was an article of faith because Jackson could fill a stadium.

This week marks 20 years in the can for The Sopranos, the TV series which almost instantly transformed into a ‘cultural phenomenon,’ although the term ‘cultural phenomenon’ is exactly the kind of cliche that most characters on the show probably would have hated. Indeed, it’s not a moniker particularly embraced by the show’s creator, David Chase, who always seemed to project a bit of depressive resignation about his role front-running the series. Asked at a panel event Wednesday night what his reaction was to the anniversary hooplah, Chase simply responded: ‘Well, confused.’ The Sopranos today has a somewhat confused legacy, because two decades later it’s firmly entered into the realm of nostalgic reminiscence.

On the one occasion when I visited Naples, the plane from Barcelona was packed with shouting Italians. They broke into exuberant cheers when we completed a routine landing, and clambered over the seats to pinch my cheek. My taxi driver got lost and it took hours to find my Airbnb, in an outlying block of flats with great chunks loose and crumbling from its garish orange façade. The airline, it goes without saying, had lost my bag, and the husband and wife who rented out the room wasted no time in selling me a toothbrush. I spoke no Italian save a few words of Dante, and they no English, but when my Italian-speaking friend arrived the next day he found he could understand them no better than I could. To blame, the notorious Neapolitan dialect.

We are so plagued by experts and inundated with know-it-alls that the popular reaction is to turn out the technocrats and embrace the know-nothings. A cynic might wonder if Axios, the political website that promises to cover issues with a series of bullet points totaling no more than 300 words, is a technocrat’s way of heading off the know-nothings, if only by ensuring that the people who still believe in expertise know a little. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but is it the meat of political analysis? Axios describes its info-gobbets as ‘smart brevity.’ Like smart foods and smart phones, this means pre-digested information, shot out in hard, pre-formed pellets. Axios offers smart conclusions, delivered with digital smartness.