Culture

Which is your favorite Jane Austen novel? OK, maybe not a conversation prompt appropriate for every setting, but a reliable one, I find, to break the ice at DC dinner parties where I’m not well acquainted with my fellow guests but spy someone who seems likely to know her work. I also ask it of younger fiction writers who come looking for advice about plot construction. I once resorted to it with a stranger, a woman of a certain age, to distract me from my irritation, sitting on an Acela train inexplicably halted outside Wilmington, Delaware, for two hours. She chose Persuasion, Austen’s elegiac account of late-in-life love.

Steven Spielberg might be the most beloved and popular American director of the 20th century, but it is also unavoidably the case that, since 2005’s Munich, he has been on something of a disappointing run. While many of his films, not least The Fabelmans and West Side Story, have been critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, there is a growing sense that he has not made a really interesting or worthwhile picture in 20 years, with the partial exception of the enjoyable, quirky, Coen Brothers-scripted Bridge of Spies.

Humor has become serious business. A nation of anxious primates trapped in a silicon casino of likes, retweets and dopamine-soaked drudgery, America is suffering from what the comedian Norm Macdonald called a “crisis of clapter.” Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It’s the old stink of a well-mannered aristocracy, and very un-American indeed. From his beginning, the ugly American – wild-eyed and rabble-rousing – rankled the Old World.

In This World of Tomorrow – the new play starring and cowritten by Tom Hanks, currently on at The Shed in Manhattan – Tom Hanks plays a classic, well, Tom Hanks character.  Bert Allenberry (Hanks) is the nicest guy in the room: he’s the kind of great guy who will escort a lady home in a taxicab, even if it will make him late. And in This World of Tomorrow being late matters a lot. Bert, you see, is a successful but dissatisfied scientist from the future who travels back in time to the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Once there he has complete free rein, except for one thing. He must return to his hotel at a certain hour to be whisked back to the future – or risk mortal bodily damage.    Love, of course, gets in the way.

The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

In the second act of Liberation the main cast quietly, and without fuss, starts to undress. By the time the lights go up, all six women are naked. In this masterful play by Bess Wohl, the moment does not feel shocking or gratuitous but somehow comforting. In 1970s Ohio, a group of women meet weekly to fight for equality through “consciousness-raising.” Mostly that consists of free-ranging conversation, of which the women have a lot and which is always smart, funny, vulnerable and eye-opening. But after reading an article about body positivity in Ms. magazine, they meet in the nude.

There are relatively few Netflix documentaries – even in this increasingly sensationalized and prurient age – that have made anything like the splash that the new show about the artist formerly known as P. Diddy has caused. Sean Combs: The Reckoning isn’t just hard to watch, but positively mind-blowing in its account of the imprisoned mogul’s actions and predilections. Although he was acquitted of the most serious charges that he was on trial for this year, Combs will not be released from jail until May 2028. Given the number of allegations and civil suits pending against him, any comeback for the disgraced musician looks impossible – even in an era when Kanye West is, apparently, given second chance after second chance.

Well, One Battle After Another is the toast of the Golden Globe nominations and Wicked: For Good is… not. That’s the biggest immediate takeaway of the first indicator as to how the awards race next year is likely to pan out. The many nuances and surprises of Monday's announcement are not only a fascinating insight into the state of Hollywood in 2025, but also a reminder that the Globes have always prized big star names above everything else – including, perhaps, the worthiness of their inclusion.

That creaking sound you hear creaking is Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. studio, turning in his grave. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had purchased one of Hollywood’s most respected studios for a staggering, indeed insane $83 billion – which makes Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 seem like the bargain of the century. The sale would create a monopoly the likes of which has never been seen before in the film industry. Most people assumed that such a bid – in this increasingly beleaguered business – is very, very bad news. They might be correct. That’s why it’s even more staggering that Paramount have today, with impeccable timing, announced their own hostile takeover bid for Warner, offering an even more outlandish $108.

For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I'm unemployed right now.” Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate.

This has been adapted from a speech titled “The Myth-Maker as Nation-Builder,” which was delivered by Jonathan Keeperman, who runs publishing house Passage Press, at the National Conservatism Conference 2025. As W.B. Yeats once said: “There is no great literature without nationality. There is no great nationality without literature.” People often ask me whether it is possible to produce right-wing art, or otherwise to use art to engineer a more nationalist politics. But this strikes me as backward thinking. Culture is the field in which a people encounters the shared symbols and language that make political life possible. Art, done well, discloses the deeper truths a people already carry within themselves. Art therefore does not produce the nation; it reveals the nation.

So, the new – and supposedly final – season of Stranger Things has arrived in Netflix, just in time for Thanksgiving. Expectations have been through the roof that this installment will not be a turkey, but the good (stranger?) thing about the series so far is that it has maintained a remarkably high level of quality since it began in 2016. This is by no means a given for an Eighties-inflected fantasy show that is so devoted (the cynics might and have said slavishly) to all things that Steven Spielberg produced in that decade that the bearded one might have sued for plagiarism, were it not for the fact that the homage remains an affectionate and heartfelt, rather than cynical, one.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, but you wouldn’t know it from the activity of the last few years. In no particular order, we have had an underwhelming valedictory single, “Now and Then,” raised from the dead thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and Peter Jackson alike; an eight-hour – eight!– documentary, Get Back, resurrected from the footage of the Let It Be sessions; and now, an all-singing, all-dancing reissue on Disney+ of the Nineties Anthology documentary series, which has been promoted with the fourth volume of offcuts and rare tracks from the band’s career, appropriately titled Anthology 4.

The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.) Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise.

Every few months or so, a new film comes along and anyone interested in the art of cinema braces themselves, because The Discourse will inevitably accompany it. There is no clearer candidate for fevered discussion next year than Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which is released, with smirking predictability, on Valentine’s Day. Ever since the film was announced, there has been controversy over everything from the casting of the Caucasian Jacob Elordi to play Heathcliff (who is referred to in Emily Brontë’s original novel as a “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect”) to the excessively clean and stylish-looking clothes worn by Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw.

Nuremberg, the latest film by James Vanderbilt – yes, the writer-director is a scion of that distinguished East Coast dynasty – contains two lead performances by Oscar-winning actors. One is extraordinary, and the other is extraordinarily bad. Yet it is a sign of how Russell Crowe and Rami Malek’s respective careers have developed over the past few years that were you invited to pick which actor is capable of greatness, and which one has descended into bizarre self-parody, it would not necessarily be easy to pick which one was which.   I shall put you out of your misery.

Recently, a friend of mine found himself having a bad day for a reason I now forget. I made a lousy attempt to cheer him up. “Omnia in bonum,” I said to him – all things work together for good. The Latin phrase has served as a salve for me in hard times. Little did I know that I had just made things much worse. He was visibly shaken. I asked him what was wrong. I had unknowingly stirred memories of his parents’ difficult and traumatizing divorce, during which that same phrase had been used by them in a pointless attempt to assuage their children’s sadness. The idea that a phrase, a memory or an object can be simultaneously cursed for one person and blessed for another had never occurred to me. It has occurred to the Finnish filmmaker Joachim Trier.