On The Good Place, a comedy about what happens to a group of medium-good people in the afterlife, D’Arcy Carden plays an immortal assistant named Janet, who’s not quite a robot, not quite human. The show, currently in its third season, unpacks the nature of morality, ethics, and good versus evil in dramatic fashion,…
At first, I thought Michelle Williams and I were going to have a 15-minute conversation about superheroes and CGI. The four-time Oscar-nominated actor has brought her considerable talents to the latest Marvel movie—the Spider-Man-adjacent and refreshingly bizarre Venom (which, among other things, is sort of a buddy…
Your typical superhero comic hinges on a cleaving of the self. A godlike being can’t walk among mortals just as a regular person can’t save the day, so Wonder Woman becomes Diana Prince, and Storm becomes Ororo Munroe—or maybe, in the latter case, it’s the other way around.
The term “gross-out humor” doesn’t conjure up much subtlety or imagination. But for artist and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt, there’s something profoundly funny in the gap between the grotesqueness of everyday life and the inevitability of its existence. In one of her best-known comics, originally drawn for the…
There’s a scene in the film Skate Kitchen in which the all-girl skate crew is swerving through the streets of their hometown New York City when a random man asks the stoner tomboy of the group, Kurt (played by Nina Moran), “Hey, can you do an ollie?”
Josephine Decker’s third feature film, Madeline’s Madeline, is an exquisite collision of content and medium, a story that could only be told in cinema. A fractured exploration of mental illness and the art-making process, the film is shot tightly, scored with thick and experimental acapellas and occasional out-of-sync…
Augustine Frizzell wanted to see a movie that represented her teen experience, and so she made it. The result is the 39-year-old writer/director’s first feature Never Goin’ Back, in select theaters today via juggernaut distributor A24. The movie follows two coke-snorting, table-waiting, shit-talking, high-school…
In spite of and perhaps because of her greatness, Lauryn Hill left many of her fans conflicted. Released on August 25, 1998, her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, gave depth and cathartic dimension to the subject of black women in love. She sang about pulling away from an ex and finding salvation in…
On paper, Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post might sound like the making of a somber tearjerker. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as the titular Cameron, a teenage girl growing up in Montana in 1993 whose boyfriend dramatically discovers her making out with her best girl friend on homecoming…
If you haven’t seen Eighth Grade yet, what are you waiting for? Bo Burnham’s directorial debut is a deft mixture of cringes and compassion, funny because it’s true, and devastating for the same reason, often at the same time. So simultaneously awkward and sweet is this movie that it suggested to me what Welcome to the…
In the 1990s, director/photographer Lauren Greenfield began a project taking pictures of high school students at her affluent Los Angeles alma mater, Crossroads. One of the shots was of a group of boys flashing what Greenfield thought were dollar bills at her. Later at home, when she reviewed the camera’s film, she…
A squeal that sounded like some sort of feedback ripped out of my phone as SOPHIE thanked me for calling. Our 30-minute conversation last week was adorned with so many (accidental?) sound effects, I felt like I was inside one of the LA-based (via Scotland) producer’s songs. After 16 high-pitched beeps, I made a…
Last week, I met Ari Aster, the writer and director of the horror film Hereditary, in the A24 office. For about 20 minutes, we talked about genre (he originally shopped Hereditary as a “family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare”), subverting expectations (undoubtedly a reason the film has proved so divisive), the…
“H’aw’ya?” Toni Collette asked me as I entered the conference room at A24's New York City office on Monday. It’s hard to say which was weirder: hearing the actor’s natural Australian accent or seeing her warm and smiling. She spends much of the movie she was in town promoting—Ari Aster’s familial tragedy/horror hybrid …
“We can’t do a whole interview about Showgirls,” Gina Gershon exhaled, not five minutes into our conversation at Odeon in Tribeca on May 21. I didn’t mean to exasperate her so soon—I couldn’t help it. The woman who played Cristal Connors in Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic of Vegas excess and g-strings—a movie I have…
It took decades for Josiah Wise to find his voice. This is figuratively true for most developing adults, but for Wise, who performs music under the name serpentwithfeet, it was also literal. The distinct, shivering vibrato he sings with—so strong it sounds like his larynx is seizing almost every time he opens his…
“Women always have to put up a fucking fight,” Revenge’s main villain, a chiseled, wealthy businessman, at one point spits at the movie’s heroine Jen while the two are locked in a violent duel. French director Coralie Fargeat’s new movie, released May 11, is the story of one blood-drenched, bullet-drilled, goretastic…
“I’m Anna Battista, I’m 24 years old, I live in Rome, and I’m the most lonely girl in the world,” Asia Argento’s lead character, a famous young Italian actress, proclaims in the writer and director’s 2000 film, Scarlet Diva. A semi-autobiographical depiction of Argento’s life, the film follows Anna, a wandering party…
On Sunday, Starz will air the first episode of Vida, a new series about two Mexican American sisters who, after their mother’s death, return to their quickly gentrifying neighborhood on the Eastside of LA. The show is groundbreaking, you may have heard, for its writer’s room, which is helmed by Mexican-born playwright…
In the early 1990s, Liz Phair started getting letters.
