Culture

There is probably no American documentary filmmaker more respected than Ken Burns. From his landmark 1990 series about the Civil War to his most recent work that has explored everyone and everything from Ernest Hemingway to country music, Burns has established himself as a fearless chronicler of stories that illuminate the nation’s history, sometimes in ways that viewers might find uncomfortable. His 2005 documentary about the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson, Unforgiveable Blackness, was a fine example of the filmmaker turning his gaze on a subject that many might have preferred be left obscure, and it won him an Emmy for Outstanding Directing as a result — one of fifteen that he and his films have won to date.

Renaissance, Beyoncé's first solo album in six years, dropped at the end of July. Critics raved about the genius of Queen Bey. Pitchfork gave the album a 9/10, calling it "immaculate." The Guardian referred to it as a "breathtaking, maximalist tour de force." "America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It," the New York Times declared. Thematically, Renaissance is courageous. It's a departure from the pop-laced R&B songs we typically hear from Beyoncé. It leans heavily on club music; it subverts expectations. However, Beyoncé's clear desire to make a statement means that the entire project comes across as trying way too hard. It's an album a listener is supposed to "get" rather than enjoy.

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.

If you won the lottery tomorrow and suddenly had the money to invest in art, what would you prefer: a work from Picasso’s Cubist period (Guitar on a Table, 1919), or an NFT made from AI-based images and shapes? On the one hand, Picasso’s Guitar on a Table isn’t his most famous or even most interesting work — by 1919, the radicalism of Cubism had begun to wane. But on the other, NFTs are a relatively unproven market with dubious artistic merit, and have been linked to art crime, money laundering, and even allegations of human trafficking. If Picasso couldn’t persuade you to ditch the digital art, what about a painting by Renoir, a sculpture by Rodin, or a triptych of paintings by Francis Bacon?

With the possible exception of 2016’s The Jungle Book, none of Disney’s live-action repristinations of its animated classics have been a real success. Beauty and the Beast was too rococo for its own good. Aladdin obsessed over politics at the expense of romance. The Lion King traded elegant animation for dead-eyed CGI. And on it goes. None of these come close, though, to the disaster that is Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio — a turgid, nihilistic recreation of the 1940 classic that fails utterly to honor its source material. This month, it’s been dumped unceremoniously onto Disney+ rather than given a proper theatrical release; even the almighty Mouse knows when it has a stinker on its hands.

The death of French director Jean-Luc Godard, at the age of 91, is probably doomed to not get its due because of the saturation media coverage of Elizabeth II. That said, it should be noted that admirers of Godard and ardent royalists probably occupy a relatively small space on a Venn diagram, and, once the funeral obsequies for the Queen have passed, the legacy of one of France’s most innovative and influential — if also infuriating — filmmakers might be taken as seriously as it deserves.

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was widely agreed that the best male performance was given by none other than Brendan Fraser in the new Darren Aronofsky film, The Whale. Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter — who also wrote the screenplay — it has nothing to do with Moby-Dick or any other watery protagonist. The title instead refers to Fraser’s character Charlie, a 600-pound middle-aged man who is determinedly eating himself to death, even as his family and friends attempt to break through the walls of pain that he has meticulously constructed for himself. The film itself has received mixed reviews, with some critics praising it and others describing it as manipulative and cheap.

Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has puzzled humankind — and possibly elves — these many millennia. Why is it that a ship floats and a stone doesn’t? The reason apparently is because "a stone sees only downward," whereas a ship has "her gaze fixed upon the light that guides her." And this, I’m afraid, set the tone for much of the dialogue that followed in the two episodes released so far — as, to their credit, the characters managed to exchange an endless series of ponderous aphorisms without giggling.

Cockburn loves a little drama, but it’s proving difficult to work out who the real villain is amid the continued theatrics of the Don’t Worry Darling cast. The film concerns a 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community. Don’t Worry Darling (Cockburn feels compelled to ask why there is no comma) was directed by Olivia Wilde, and started filming what seems like decades ago One thing is certain: the crew saved their best performances for the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival instead of the actual thing. The film has been branded a disappointment by critics, who claim that Harry Styles, Wilde's boyfriend who plays a lead role, is "charisma-free.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Amazon’s new mega-series, aka "Jeff Bezos’s answer to Game of Thrones." There is probably no property more beloved in fantasy circles than JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, superbly filmed by Peter Jackson at the beginning of the millennium. But Hollywood — and its latest cousin, streaming television — finds itself unable to let go where there is the prospect of a hit. So first we had the endlessly protracted and deeply boring Hobbit series, and now we have Amazon’s new venture into Tolkien’s universe, the grandiosely titled Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

In April, director Robert Eggers told GQ that “every time period interests me except for the one we’re living in.” The director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman will never make a movie set in modern times: “I get enough of the kitchen sink in my kitchen sink... For whatever reason, it just does not inspire me. And you can’t shoot something that doesn’t inspire you.” That’s a good attitude for a director to have, but it’s alarming how many American filmmakers are either uninterested, unwilling or unable to make work that speaks directly, not only to our present moment, but to our future and its possibilities, however limited and grim. Who can blame anyone for being hopeless now?

It’s hard not to feel slightly odd when standing in front of a Milton Avery painting. Take his 1943 work Hors d’Oeuvres as an example. The painting — currently on show at London’s Royal Academy’s exhibition, Milton Avery: American Colorist — is large, at nearly a meter across, and the background is what appears to be a coastal landscape, with a greenish sea and the curve of a bay appearing in the upper right-hand corner. In the foreground of the painting is a cream table and on it, a blue platter of food: the “hors d’oeuvres” of the work’s title. So far, it might be hard to understand what is so disconcerting about this painting.

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: yes, Idris Elba punches a lion in this movie, and yes, that part’s pretty great. If only the rest of Beast reached those heights. Director Baltasar Kormákur (no stranger to survival thrillers, after previously helming Everest and Adrift) has put together a late-summer actioner that’s entertaining enough, but probably a little too tame for its own good. Following the unexpected loss of his wife to cancer, American doctor Nate Daniels (Elba) brings his two daughters Mer (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries) into the African bush to visit Nate’s old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley, in full great-white-hunter mode).

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.

We live in an age in which everything sounds so grave. Our democracy is in peril! Covid numbers are going up! It’s a cause for rejoicing, then, that one of the best new series treats that most serious of subjects — namely, homicide — with such a deft and delightful touch. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, which was created by co-star Steve Martin and John Hoffman, expands the honorable tradition of the Thin Man series and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, movies that used the murder-mystery format as a pretext for their sophisticated urbanites to poke around in other people’s residences and speculate wittily on who done it. The series wraps up its second season on Tuesday.

I should have known when the Disney+ logo splashed across the screen. The last time I saw it, what followed was an impassable disclaimer warning me of the microaggressions I might endure watching a pair of Asian cats. I should have known when we landed again in San Fransokyo — the setting of Disney’s Big Hero 6 and new spinoff, Baymax! — and the cast looked like bad stock art from the Oberlin College DEI handbook. I should have known. But, there I was, two sick kids (two and six) running 102-degree fevers, upset and crying, nestled on either side of me on the couch. We just needed a break. Something wholesome; simple; happy. This was Disney’s sweet spot. Earlier this month Disney+ reported reaching 221.

When Bryce Dallas Howard signed her contract for the Jurassic World franchise, she didn’t get as big of a deal as her co-star Chris Pratt. This is not shocking news. At the time, Pratt was already an established star, whereas Howard’s résumé was much thinner. She’d played some unnamed roles in a handful of movies and portrayed supporting characters in two Twilight films and Spider-Man 3, but had yet to break out in a starring role. Jurassic World changed all that. This prompted Pratt to step in for Howard and handle the negotiations for licensing deals related to the franchise, guaranteeing that he and Howard would be paid equally.

I was reprimanded by my parents for talking during the minute’s silence at Princess Diana’s funeral. In my defense, I was six years old at the time. Almost twenty-five years have passed since that fateful night in Paris, when the People’s Princess was pursued by the press one last time. In the years since, Diana’s legacy has hung over not just the British royal family, but the relationship between society and celebrity. Her death marked one of the first real moments of global introspection: was our paparazzi too invasive, our press too dogged? We now look back at the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Lindsay Lohan and ask the same questions. But it all goes back to Di.

On a Saturday in August, stuck in Manhattan  and growing less enamored of the thought, I holed up at the Park Avenue Armory to catch English director Robert Icke’s Hamlet (2015) and Oresteia (2017), playing in repertory. Icke is a darling young thing on the British theater scene, “acclaimed,” as the program informs us, “for his intelligent and accessible productions” of classic texts. Hamlet runs for three hours and forty minutes, Oresteia for three fifteen, which gives you some idea of what is meant (or not) by “accessible.” These are big, bold productions. But for what it’s worth, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall proved accessible to a packed crowd.