With his new science-fiction satire Mickey 17, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is back with his first movie since he swept the Academy Awards for 2019 with his lucid-looking class-conflict film Parasite. Granted, nobody writing in English has yet put forward a convincing explanation of what ...
Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they ...
With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go? One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, ...
With the 2025 Super Bowl eleven days away, much seems to be going well for the National Football League. For example, the current decline of wokeness reduces the concern aroused during the Colin Kaepernick era that this inherently conservative game would self-destruct over race. The NFL remains ...
I’m writing on Monday night, so when you read this, you’ll know more than I did about how badly the Los Angeles fires flared back up during Tuesday’s forecasted windstorm. The coming annihilation of Los Angeles has been a persistently popular topic over the past century, which has once again ...
The musical biopic A Complete Unknown competently depicts the most famous of the heel turns Bob Dylan has amused himself with over his long career: how he stabbed in the back his purist leftist folk music fans by going to their 1965 Newport Folk Festival and playing “Like a Rolling Stone” loud, ...
A fascinating test case of the rule of law in America is whether or not law schools are obeying the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision in the summer of 2023 finding affirmative action in undergraduate admissions to be a violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise of “equal ...
A fascinating recent example of what I call cops retreating to the doughnut shop began in July 2023 when the New Jersey State Police largely stopped issuing traffic tickets for six to eight months after being accused once again of racial profiling, with the result that, surprise, surprise, car ...
Sir Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus has been one of the more unexpectedly culturally influential films of the 21st century. Americans had thought endlessly about Ancient Rome until the later 20th century, as my recent visit to Washington, D.C., pointed ...
Your opinion of the hit movie Wicked: Part 1, a 160-minute extrapolation of the 90-minute opening act of the Broadway musical Wicked, depends upon your answer to the question: When it comes to Wicked, can there be too much of a good thing? Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the freshman ...
