In the tradition of Laverne and Shirley, of Abbi and Ilana, of Beavis and Butt-head, Maya and Anna—the pair of thirteen-year-olds at the racing heart of “PEN15” (Hulu)—are a duo allied against the rude truths of a tough universe. The Read More …
On a Friday evening in October, before the New York première of “Man Made”—a documentary about the world’s only all-transgender bodybuilding competition—the film’s creators gathered at a tin-ceilinged bar in Chelsea called Underballs. (The bar is situated beneath a meatball Read More …
America, with its chronic inability to address the massacre of schoolchildren, has proved inhospitable to “Heathers,” a miniseries created by Jason Micallef, which will première on the semi-obscure Paramount Network on Thursday. The show is based on the movie from Read More …
The seventieth Primetime Emmy Awards aired on NBC, and the network was pitiless about reminding us. In the lower third of the screen, teasers for the new fall shows plumed like puffs of ragweed pollen. Above, a bevy of “Saturday Read More …
Evenings around the campfire in southern Baja, we’d play music, read from manuscripts, tell stories, and talk about what was next in our lives, or what we hoped would come next. It was that kind of trip in February of Read More …
Before Senator John McCain’s casket, swaddled in a neatly laid American flag, was moved, on Saturday morning, to the National Cathedral, where his funeral would be held, it sat at the center of the Capitol rotunda, lit from above by Read More …
Last week, a strange shard of fashion marketing pierced many thousands of bubbles, after Nate Bethea, a journalist and U.S. Army veteran, excavated a thirty-second ad for Grunt Style, a clothing brand pitched at soldiers, sailors, and Marines. The year-old Read More …
Tom Cruise was about to turn thirty-one when “The Firm,” the film adaptation of John Grisham’s best-selling novel, hit theatres. In the movie, Cruise plays a hotshot boy wonder just out of Harvard Law, who takes a job as an Read More …
On Monday afternoon, as I was perusing my Instagram feed in the usual slack-jawed half-daze, I came across an image that I hadn’t seen in something like a decade, but that nonetheless hit me, mid-scroll, with a potent sense of Read More …
Tom Clancy’s most famed protagonist, Jack Ryan, is a morally perfect C.I.A. analyst with a background in the Marines and a calling to save the world. In screen adaptations of the author’s techno-thrillers, Ryan is far less flashy than the Read More …