Reviews
Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review
The Pitch: What Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did for music biopics, Netflix’s American Vandal did for the true-crime docuseries. For two glorious seasons of adolescent dick and poop jokes painted with all the forensic seriousness of Making a Murderer, Tony Yacenda (who also directed episodes of Dave and real-life true crime doc Trial by Media) and Dan Perrault perfectly threaded the needle between the melodramatic trivia of teenhood and the over-the-top mechanics of true crime. After that show’s unceremonious cancellation, Yacenda and Perrault are back with another pointed critique of the documentary format and the juvenile antics of manchildren. This time, the question is: What would The Last Dance look like if it were actually about mouthbreathing esp...
Chicago Chefs Cook Through the Pain in FX’s Bittersweet Dramedy The Bear: Review
The Pitch: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Shameless‘s Jeremy Allen White) is a young, ambitious chef who fled his working-class Chicago roots to spend a few years as one of the hottest chefs at a prestigious New York restaurant. Now, he’s returned home, feeling the joint stings of professional burnout, alcoholism, and (most importantly) the tragic death of his older brother by suicide. What’s more, Carmy’s brother left him the family business, a down-on-its-luck Italian beef joint called The Original Beef of Chicagoland. Now, he’s tasked with not just keeping the place afloat, but bringing his haute cuisine training to the restaurant and the gaggle of misfits that work there, from his hotheaded cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who manages the place with its tenuous link to coke dealers a...
The Barry Season 3 Finale Captures Keenly Why Connection Matters
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Barry, “starting now.”] It has always been a tricky thing, calling Barry a comedy, but the show may have left that word behind for good. The third season of the Emmy-winning HBO series has been awfully focused on consequences — or, more importantly, the ripple effects of a person’s actions in life, especially when those actions involve the death of another. And while we’ve been seeing those ripple effects all season long, primarily in the form of people trying to kill Barry (Bill Hader) as revenge for his past crimes, things really do come full circle in the season finale. Breaking it down, the narrative’s a relatively simple one, wrapping up key storylines across the season. Gene’s (Henry Winkler) career prospe...
Maluma Masterfully Navigates the Romantic and Risqué on Love & Sex Tape
Maluma is spicing things up on his seventh album. The Colombian heartthrob channels the playful sex appeal in his new collection of romantic and risqué tunes. After teasing fans with a few steamy posts on Instagram, Maluma surprise-released his new LP The Love & Sex Tape. Across the eight-song album, he returns to his reggaeton roots while adding an alluring electronic touch. Maluma seamlessly weaves his charming flow into his love songs and bedroom bangers. The Love & Sex Tape arrives during one of the biggest years in Maluma’s career. He starred in his first major movie role alongside Jennifer Lopez in Marry Me and later grinded with Madonna during his sold-out Medellín concert. Now a decade into his career, Maluma wants the world to know that fame hasn’t taken away his Medellín ...
Dirty Daddy: The Bob Saget Tribute Is a Messy But Loving Remembrance — Review
Bob Saget pulled off a remarkable trick over his long and busy career in comedy: He spent the late ’80s and much of the ’90s as one of America’s favorite professional genial dorks, playing a square dad on the cornball and often unbearably saccharine ABC sitcom Full House and ringmaster to America’s less professionally genial dorks — those suffering home-recorded mishaps on the same network’s America’s Funniest Home Videos. After those gigs ended, though, he directed one very funny and decidedly less clean comedy, Dirty Work, and word about his non-ABC comedy career spread: That Bob Saget fellow really works pretty blue! This was probably always true outside of his time on ABC — how many comedians can’t hit a blue streak sometimes? — but Saget seemed to particularly delight in puncturing hi...
Jurassic World Dominion Has Us Rooting for the Dinosaurs, and That’s Probably a Bad Thing — Review
The Pitch: In a twist no one could have possibly seen coming, it turns out that releasing a wide variety of extinct species into a global ecosystem might have some negative repercussions on said global ecosystem. That’s where Jurassic World Dominion begins, four years following the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is almost enough time for most of the world to get used to the spread of dinosaurs across the planet. But funnily enough, the most dangerous creatures in this brave new world aren’t dinosaurs — they’re bugs. Specifically, the prehistoric-sized locusts that have begun tearing through the world’s crops, which if left unchecked could have extinction-level repercussions for literally every living creature. Fortunately, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is doing her best t...
The Janes Is a Timely, Tight-Knit Oral History of Underground Abortions: Review
The Pitch: On May 3, 2022, a draft opinion from the Supreme Court leaked to Politico detailed the Court’s majority decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. The Roe v. Wade decision, which was declared in 1973, guaranteed the constitutional right for a pregnant woman or person to receive an abortion if they choose. In the years that followed, the ruling had allowed more Americans to have greater access to birth control and other forms of pregnancy-prevention measures without the risk of them losing their lives in the process. Given how integral Roe v. Wade has been to people across the country, the fact that it could be struck down is terrifying, to say the least. This landscape makes the release of The Janes, HBO’s latest documentary directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, so much more critical. B...
Irma Vep is a Refreshingly Meta Take on the Lines Between Art and Life: Review
The Pitch: Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander) is an A-list Hollywood action star, hot off a Marvel-like superhero film called Doomsday whose smash success is colored by losing her assistant and lover, Laurie (Adria Arjona), to the film’s director during the shoot. Licking her wounds, she takes a break from blockbusters to fly to France to shoot a limited-series remake of the 1910s French serial Les vampires, in which she’ll play the iconic cat-suited criminal Irma Vep. But the shoot is suitably manic and unpredictable, from its director, René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), being such a volatile, insecure mess that the financiers won’t insure him to her prima donna castmate, to Vincent Lacoste’s Edmond, who keeps trying to change his dorky detective character to better flatter his machismo, and...
Angel Olsen Delivers Country-Sized Emotions on Big Time
Angel Olsen has never repeated herself. Her debut Half Way Home introduced Olsen as a psych-folk songwriter with a powerhouse voice, before the lo-fi indie of Burn Your Fire For No Witness reframed her within the context of a band. Two years later, My Woman upped the production value and saw Olsen at her most intense and confrontational. All Mirrors wiped clean any pre-conceptions of Olsen, and even when she literally repeated herself with Whole New Mess, it felt like an entirely new statement. Since the one-two punch of All Mirrors and Whole New Mess, Olsen has kept fans guessing on which direction she might be headed next. In 2021, she released her Sharon Van Etten collaboration “Like I Used To,” a victory lap of an indie rock song for two of the genre’s most accomplished singer-songwrit...
Not Even Post Malone Can Save Post Malone on Twelve Carat Toothache
Twelve Carat Toothache (out today, June 3rd) is Post Malone‘s shortest album to date. And according to Posty, this is a deliberate play to resist the overloaded track lists that dominate streaming platforms; “I’ve made a lot of compromises, especially musically, but now I don’t feel like I want to anymore,” he said in a Billboard cover story back in January, “I don’t need a No. 1; that doesn’t matter to me no more, and at a point, it did.” This points to a few different potential outcomes for his fourth studio album — now that Post Malone has indeed scored his multiple No. 1s, ascended to true headliner status, and became a “sensitive bad boy” icon, taking some of that pressure off to make hit after hit could absolutely work in his favor. If he has nothing to lose at this point in his some...
Fire Island Review: A Delicious Jane Austen-Infused Rom-Com That Matches the Master’s Wit
The Pitch: Right from the jump, thanks to the voiceover of Noah (Joel Kim Booster) and a carefully planted copy of Pride and Prejudice, Fire Island tells you what it’s going to be — a retelling of the Jane Austen classic tale, relocated to a place and time that Jane Austen would have had a very hard time imagining: the titular gay party mecca centered in the hamlets of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Noah and his friends (including Matt Rogers, Tomás Matos, and Torian Miller) are making their annual trek to the island for a week of fun, sun, drugs, dancing, and most importantly — hooking up. But this year, things are a bit different. For one thing, their beloved adoptive mom Erin (Margaret Cho) has to sell her house on the island soon, giving this trip an air of finality. And also, Noa...
IDK and Kaytranada Keep It Simple
“Simple City” is the name locals gave to Benning Terrace, a housing project in southeast D.C. shouted out by local go-go artists and once recognized as one of the most active sites of gang violence in the country. Growing up a half-mile over the Maryland border, rapper IDK became childhood friends with a boy from the projects, and as his rap career opened up a world of new possibilities to him, he also sought to open doors for his friend. His latest project, a joint EP with DJ/producer Kaytranada, pays homage to the D.C. neighborhood and shows that life there is anything but Simple. The music video for “Taco”—the debut single off the EP—is set in Simple City and shot almost entirely in black-and-white. IDK’s outfit only adds to the contrast of the video. Looking like he didn’t change after...
