The year was 2007. A young upstart from Chicago was promising change we could believe in. Meanwhile, another son of the Windy City, Kanye West, had an idea for a quintessentially Yes We Can pursuit: a puppet-based sketch comedy show. Alligator Boots, which West cocreated along with collaborator and friend Rhymefest, came to life as […]
The seventh season of Game of Thrones opens in its most infamous locale: The Twins. This was the place where the story shattered—where the rules of Westeros, the rules of hospitality, the rules of fantasy stories themselves sheared away from themselves like a great wall of ice and floated away into the sea. It’s often […]
For political news junkies, this past week amounted to one hell of a bender. Nearly every day there was some massive report that would send Twitter into a frenzy. You could almost set a watch by the late-afternoon news alert on your phone. Oh, a notification from CNN? It must be 5pm Eastern! With so […]
Welcome back. We hope you all had fun celebrating the 40th anniversary of Star Wars last week. Did you commemorate it by re-watching A New Hope? Was there a Wookiee costume involved? No matter what, we hope it was grand. (If you didn't get enough 40th anniversary celebrations, please do delve into what StarWars.com did […]
The average movie ticket costs $8.95. In major metropolitan areas, you can easily spend twice that. So the economics behind subscription service MoviePass’s new plan—$10 per month, for as many movie trips as you can stomach—seem at least halfway insane. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find a scheme that doesn’t just potentially save […]
It was late last year, around mid-September, when I finally surrendered to the fatigue. The months preceding had been besieged by nonstop work, paralyzing anxiety, and what felt like a gushing waterfall of stress. I was 30, and like a handful of friends who’d shared comparable stories, felt increasingly and exponentially overwhelmed by the dizzying […]
Charlize Theron was badass in Mad Max: Fury Road, but she gets even Furiosa in Atomic Blonde. Toward the end of the Cold War thriller that opens Friday, the camera follows Theron (playing an MI6 spy) up an elevator, onto a stairwell where she’s attacked by Russian thugs, into an apartment where she employs a […]
What do you do with a superhero after you've turned him into a bad guy? That's the question quietly haunting the story mode of Injustice 2, the sequel to a 2013 fighting game starring DC Comics characters. In the original, director Ed Boon (Mortal Kombat) and his studio, NetherRealm, turned comic books' most enduring icon […]
Book adaptation is fraught. There are longtime fans to please, imaginations to live up to, childhood memories to compete with. It’s nearly impossible to please all the people all the time. Director Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time is out to do just that—by making a movie that reflects all of them. Related […]
Another week, another seven days so full of events that it’s difficult to remember all that’s happened. That’s especially true on a week that saw another mass shooting, as if everyone needed a reminder of what that felt like. I mean, we were just a week out from the last one, so perhaps some people […]