Culture

If you would like to see that rarest of endangered species — a smart, witty and original 90-minute thriller aimed at adults — then stop reading this review immediately and go and see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It is a film that is probably best enjoyed by going in entirely blind, where the bare bones of the premise, revolving around a husband-and-wife pair of British spies who find themselves under suspicion of treachery, possibly by one another, is all you need to know. Yet if you need further convincing, then rest assured that this a one-of-a-kind blend of Mission: Impossible, Private Lives and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith thrown into the mix, to season.

When the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar first met David Bowie, he didn’t think a man could turn a whiter shade of pale. The singer looked emaciated; his complexion teetered on translucency, and weighing only 95 pounds, the only signs of life were a pulse and a mop of orange hair. It was the mid-Seventies, and Bowie was touring America deep in the throes of addiction — the “darkest years” of his life — surviving on a paltry diet of red peppers, cigarettes, milk and cocaine. Yet somehow, through the haze of these drug-fueled years, Bowie underwent a chameleonic reinvention of self and sound — and finally broke America. Bowie had cast a sheen of suspicion over America as an aspiring artist, even admitting to hating it initially.

LOG is the name of ungraded digital video footage. It’s flat, lifeless, and dark, but that’s fine because you can tweak, tune, and adjust in a way that was never possible with film, fiddling with exposure, contrast, saturation, and so forth. In those days, everything had to look as good as possible on the film. But, with the ability to grade in post, fix visual effects in post, and change backgrounds and designs in post, directors started getting lazy. And eventually, some convinced themselves that ugliness is a distinct stylist choice. It’s not laziness; it’s an aesthetic. I say all this as, in another era — an era with more care — Dope Thief could have been a great show.

We remain fascinated, even obsessed, by the Mitfords. Collectively, their existence is the stuff of legend: the affairs, the imprisonment, the polarized politics, the wit, the beauty, and the brutality, all in one glamorous package. In uncertain times, the sisters offer a flush of eccentric characters: Nancy the Novelist, Pamela the horsewoman, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Jessica the Communist and Debo the Duchess.

Usually, when a film wins Best Picture at the Oscars, the inevitable backlash takes years, if not decades, to come to the surface. Sometimes, it’s simply because the “wrong film” won (Crash over Brokeback Mountain, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan), and on other occasions, it is because a film’s social or sexual politics have dated incredibly badly. (Here’s looking at you, American Beauty.) Yet after what must be the most contentious and controversial Oscar season in living memory, during which no fewer than four separate films were all tipped for glory at one point, the eventual victor ludorum, Sean Baker’s Anora, is facing a vicious and sustained assault on its credentials that is without precedent.

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for elegant people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location — only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading "One week earlier." After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking folks arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where they were welcomed by the resolutely smiling staff and a nervous manager, before gazing round and marveling at the beauty of it all.

Somehow the strange circumstances of the death of Gene Hackman, found dead in his New Mexico home with his wife Betsy and their dog, make the end of one of America’s finest actors all the more poignant. The full details will presumably become clear soon — but whatever happened, it is more important to remember Hackman’s legendary on-screen career than to waste time fixating on his final moments. He was an actor without sentiment, but with enormous amounts of fierce compassion — even when playing villains — and it is those qualities that should be celebrated. Hackman began his life in the Marine Corps before he became an actor, and many of his best performances have the tough, unbending quality that he developed in the military.

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what's anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live's fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars. Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison.

Usually, by the time the BAFTAs — now comfortably established, along with the Golden Globes, as a dress rehearsal for the Oscars — roll around, it is fairly clear which film or films are likely to be taking gold at the Academy Awards next month. Thanks to the often frenzied behind-the-scenes lobbying and intriguing of various well-paid publicists, a storyline will emerge, and it is only in relatively rare cases that there will be a genuine surprise on the night. After all, nobody wants to spend a fortune on promoting (or celebrating) a lost cause. This year, however, is wildly unpredictable, and in fact is the first occasion since 2019 that it’s genuinely difficult to know which film is going to be triumphant.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has opened worldwide to largely positive reviews. Negative ones have focused on the silly quibble that fiction is not fact: the story told in the movie of Dylan’s rise to fame, from his January 1961 arrival in New York City as an unknown, folk-obsessed teenager from the Minnesota Iron Range, to his electrified electrifying performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, does not strictly hew to actual biography. Recently the New York Times made the unfathomable decision to take A.J. Weberman, best known for going through the Dylans’ garbage when they lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s (and getting thumped by Dylan for stalking), to see A Complete Unknown.

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.

"Are there any more questions?” I asked loudly. I was struggling to make myself heard above about thirty seventh-graders, whom I was leading on a tour of the National Gallery of Art. There had already been many questions that morning, even before we began looking at objects in the museum’s permanent collection. We had just finished an analysis and discussion of techniques and symbolism in a seventeenth-century sculpture from Seville, so I took advantage of the momentary lull in the hand-raising and was walking toward the next work on our itinerary when I heard an unexpected sound. Thud. Turning, I saw that one of the students had fainted, practically at my feet. Teacher and chaperones rushed in, and after a few moments the student was fine.