In the beginning, there was only the video camera and the birthday party. Long before the endless album delays and perpetually in-progress tracks, before the eclipsing-the-main-event listening parties, before the beautiful dark twisted fantasies, before the tabloids and tantrums and meltdowns and fashion lines and presidential bids (but not before …
Read More »Did Armie Hammer's Scandal Sink 'Death on the Nile'?
The star-studded Death on the Nile premiered this past weekend, distributed by 20th Century Studios (i.e. Disney), headlined by Gal Gadot and helmed by freshly minted Oscar nominee Kenneth Branagh. A lavish adaptation of Agatha Christie’s beloved 1937 novel, and a sequel to Branagh’s prior Christie effort Murder on the …
Read More »The Top 15 Most Legendary J.Lo Moments of All Time
Has there ever been a star like Jennifer Lopez? Never. What a long, weird, wonderful career she’s built — a whole new genre of celebrity, a one-woman paradigm shift in pop culture. She’s done it all. A little song, a little dance, a lot of movies, some romance. The world’s …
Read More »'What Happened to Pam Was So Wrong': Lily James on Stepping Into an Icon's Red Swimsuit
In the run-up to playing Pamela Anderson in the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, the London-based actor Lily James had to submit an application to the State Department so she could enter the U.S. for filming. And the bureaucrat on whose desk that application landed took one look at it, …
Read More »Oscars 2022: Everything You Need to Know About the Best Picture Nominees
That sound you heard this morning — the cacophonous combo of joyous screams, disappointed groans, the gnashing of teeth and breaking of glass — can only mean one thing: the nominations for the 2022 Academy Awards have indeed been announced. Per usual, Oscars voters dished up a few extremely predictable …
Read More »“I Just Said, Fuck It”: How Jennifer Lopez Broke All the Rules to Get to the Top
O n a warm December day in her West Hollywood offices, actress, singer, dancer, producer, mogul, brand, and multi-multimillionaire Jennifer Lopez was trying not to say too much. “I’m trying not to say too much,” she says, verbatim, as she sits on a leather chesterfield wearing a serene expression, a …
Read More »'Abbott Elementary' Is Leading a Network Sitcom Comeback
There have been a lot of days lately where it’s felt like the traditional broadcast TV networks haven’t been trying very hard. Their primary goal, it so often seems, is to keep generating spin-offs of pre-existing franchises (coming soon, probably: FBI: IT Enterprise Services Division) and to provide library content …
Read More »Lena Dunham Is Back — and Yes, This Movie's Sort of About Her Too
Ever since she burst onto the scene more than a decade ago, audiences have struggled to separate Lena Dunham the writer-director-actress from the female leads she creates. First, there was Aura, the floundering film-school student at the center of her semi-autobiographical indie Tiny Furniture, which lit up the festival circuit …
Read More »The 10 Best Movies at Sundance 2022
The usual prep for Sundance involves a good deal of packing (warm coats, snow-ready boots, a dozen thermals and a lot of Theraflu) and several weeks of intense physical training (wind sprints to better catch fast-moving shuttles, long stairmaster sessions for those screenings at the fourth floor Library theater, extreme-cold …
Read More »Norman Jewison: Why Sidney Poitier Was Perfect for 'In the Heat of the Night'
When Norman Jewison came across an early draft of the script for In the Heat of the Night, the then-39-year-old Canadian director recognized that this adaptation of John Ball’s novel — about a Black cop caught in the middle of a murder mystery in the Deep South — had the …
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