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I Got Your Cinema Right Here

The Ballsiest Picks for This Century’s 100 Best Movies “How could I forget about you?” asks the lead in one of Mel Brooks’s favorite  movies,  “You’re the only person I know.” Right you are, it’s memory-wiped Jason Bourne, the film is “The Bourne Identity,” and it’

It Was A Zombie Jamboree: "28 Years Later," and snatches in the L.A. streets

Dodging the infected onscreen; dodging the thugs in Santa Monica A lot of world leaders talkin' 'bout war And I'm afraid they're going too far So it's up to us, you and me To put an end to catastrophe We must appeal

"Be it conscience, karma or the universe, they are ultimately ...punished"

“Authority that does not exist for Liberty,” wrote the storied if controversial English historian Lord Acton, “is not authority but force.”  If you live in L.A.—in fact, if you live in Trump’s America and worry how we’ll ever rein in the administration’s harrowing campaign to

"Mountainhead"'s Tech Bros Mad-Dog the Planet

"Succession"'s Jesse Armstrong delivers some entertainment almost as distressing as real life now is... As Jesse Armstrong peopled the "Mountainhead" retreat with the four tech oligarchs we'll be trapped with for an hour and forty-nine minutes as the HBO Max movie debuted

How Did This Become Our Lives?

“Your Friends and Neighbors” Lands  In A Place Jon Hamm Owns The headline that leads off this post is a quote from Episode 8 of the above-referenced series on AppleTV+, the penultimate offering in a first season that will conclude Friday, May 30. (The streamer recently renewed the show for

At 42, John Mulaney Is Still Coming of Age

In  a May 12 set at Largo at the Coronet, the comic, blindfolded, ramped up for a major tour John Mulaney walked onstage wearing a dark black blindfold. The lanky, reliably smiling Chicagoan typically strides onstage well primed, limbs jangling, moving with a slight lateral sashay that he has attributed

"Etoile": Dancing Through High Culture's Extinction

"The arts are under siege," says Amy Sherman Palladino, and that sets the stage for an engaging romp that shows the battle up close   When Lou de Laage first appears before us as Cheyenne in “Etoile,”  she’s a whirling waterspout of eco-warrior wrath, railing against the crew

Can A TV Show Make Us Better?

"The Pitt" is a spinal tap into some very gnarly stuff. Why is it giving us such... joy?   The sheer watchability of “The Pitt” caught this cynicism-adjacent viewer unaware. Word had gone forth that that Sherri Crichton, who controls certain rights to late husband Michael’s commercial legacy,

"Warfare" Delivers Just What the Title Says

Ray Mendoza says if we shudder at the fright and noise, "That would be awesome." With thanks to IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio for the assignment and edit– and please go to IndieWire for more and updated coverage of the buzzed-about film– I spoke with the former SEAL,

Joe Cocker belongs in the Hall of Fame--with a little help from his friends

Paul McCartney and Billy Joel agree: Let's vote him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame In midsummer, 1982, I traveled to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was overseeing the sessions for a comeback record from Joe Cocker. If the

Corey Booker Made Me Cry; Now Let's Block the Coup

Yes, Cory Booker, you made me cry. I certainly hadn’t planned on that. As his marathon Monday-night speech before the Senate drove towards a record 25 hours, I was channel-flipping between such sports fare as Lakers versus Rockets and Dodger versus Braves, and also had the laptop open, second-screening

Growing Up Island--The Island Book of Records Will Take You There

There were three men came out of the West Their fortunes for to try And these three men made a solemn vow John Barleycorn must die…  Traditional, from the song (and album of the same name by) Traffic When the above song and album made the transatlantic move from being

"Adolescence" Hits Hard: “If My Dad Made Me, How Did I Make That?”

Let’s begin with a spoiler alert I’ll leave in lower case letters, although on paper it could seem a real doozy. That said, in in the bravely conceived and delivered dramatic foray that is “Adolescence,” it serves simply as prelude to a much more significant series of creative

"The White Lotus”: “Shit’s About to Get Crazy”?

Man, we really could have used a distractingly seductive streaming series right about now. If indeed our democracy is to be dismantled before our eyes, with only the court system to stem the DOGE tide, couldn’t Mike White have offered us a more enfolding respite with Season 3 of