After Beyoncé and Jay-Z beyoncéd their joyous joint album Everything Is Love Saturday evening, the memes turned to Christina Aguilera. Mere hours earlier, on Friday, she released her eighth studio album Liberation—her first in six years—and so it seemed she’d been eclipsed. What was supposed to be her comeback turned…
Because we are women and therefore simple creatures who are easily enticed by a movie with a cast of all women, the Jezebel staff had been hotly anticipating Ocean’s 8 for awhile. For months, we would walk past promotional posters (“Every Con Has Its Pros,” they read) and would think, Good tagline! We’d then proceed…
“Can someone please explain modern high school boys to me?” asks Claire (Madeline Weinstein), the long-suffering girlfriend of the questioning, titular character of Netflix’s new queer-teen flick, Alex Strangelove. “They are so oversensitive and high strung and selfish and just, like, rude. My mom made me watch this…
Disclaimer: This blog has major spoilers.
If only Brokeback Mountain and the Frozen musical hadn’t already claimed it, “Love is a force of nature” would be the perfect tagline for Adrift. Based on actual events that resulted in Tami Oldham Ashcraft floating helplessly in a critically damaged sailboat for 41 days in 1983 after an unexpected hurricane, Adrift…
The unnamed narrator of Sheila Heti’s new contemplative new novel Motherhood is ambivalent about having children. She never envisioned herself as a mother and still can’t quite see herself as one. But, now in her late 30s, the question of motherhood nags at her, demanding an answer. “Time is running short on making…
It is extremely gutsy to take on an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock when there is already Peter Weir’s perfect 1975 film. But not long into Amazon’s 2018 revamp of the Gothic classic does it become clear that the show’s intention isn’t to simply bring this story of four schoolgirls who…
Forgive me, self-assigned arbiters of taste, but I’m about to lay one on you: Life of the Party, for all it’s simplistic script-flipping, is kinda great. At the very least, it’s a pleasant ride and doesn’t ask to be anything else.
Constructing an album as a reflection of sexual awakening is practically a rite of passage for pop singers (particularly women pop singers) at this point. There was Madonna’s Erotica, Janet Jackson’s janet (and then The Velvet Rope and then All for You and then Damita Jo and then...), Rihanna’s Rated R into Loud,…
This review contains spoilers. Not as many as you’d think, however, because I’m still not entirely sure what just happened?
Duck Butter’s Naima (Alia Shawkat) and Sergio (Laia Costa) fuck like the world is ending. They do it at Sergio’s house, they do it at Naima’s house, they do it outside within potential view of strangers. They finger bang on a piano bench and kiss in between slurps of mango. They recreate Sergio’s experience of…
Mary Shelley has all the makings of a classic teen girl coming-of-age film. There’s a passionate, star-crossed romance, spats with pseudo-intellectual sexist bros who undermine our heroine’s intelligence, drunken parties, and nights filled with scribbling in a notebook instead of sleeping. The themes are so familiar,…
In the weeks leading up to its premiere—a promo run that saw Amy Schumer doing her best to get ahead of what might be a public excoriation—there’s been heavy criticism about the premise of I Feel Pretty, fueled more so by publicity and perception than the film’s content. The movie itself isn’t all that bad. Schumer,…
Though I am not one, I share a trait with all straight men. That is: there is a place in my heart reserved for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a certain curiosity about his strong (to the point of life-threatening) physical abilities. (To quote one of the many Rampage trailers and a scene of gratuitous violence in the…
In 2014, two popular mixtapes and a resulting record deal with RCA launched Tinashe into major pop culture conversations. It seemed like she was gearing up for a long and fruitful career. We began to see tangibles: a critically-acclaimed debut album (Aquarius); a series of noteworthy co-signs (Drake included) for her…
A fun but admittedly bleak game to play while watching the countless movies that depict the impending end of the world (or the disastrous results of coming so close to it), is to ask yourself: Could I survive this? When forced to roam for safety, would you find yourself eating human flesh as the roving cannibals of …
Cardi B, the exceptional ex-stripper who fashioned herself into a superstar, has created a brand that involves people accepting her jagged edges. As a rapper, she transparently shoots for not just a big audience impression, but whatever visibility, on whatever platform, will make her greater. We’ve embraced that her…
There is a hope that Hollywood—namely, for the naive and optimistic—will tell stories that go under-documented, exposing real truths to what history has presented inaccurately, or in severe cases, demonized. At the end of last year I, Tonya sought to recontextualize our villainous view of Olympic ice skating hopeful…
Welcome to Movies I Loved That Are Actually Bad, a maybe one-time column about movies we loved at certain points in our lives that we—upon maturing—now realize are terrible. This time, and maybe the last time: The Boondock Saints.
A teen comedy that centers on a gay character, released by a major studio, Love, Simon would have been a landmark film for merely existing. But the movie is extraordinary beyond its elevator pitch, and notable beyond the scarcity of the representation it provides. It is an uncommonly empathetic interrogation of the…
