Television
The Midnight Club contains all the ingredients necessary for a perfect spooky season binge: a Gothic mansion, extremely disaffected yet self-aware young people, moody cinematography, and gorgeous interiors, including the coolest library you’ve ever seen.
I put Joni Mitchell on a short list of the most remarkable pop music artists of the ’60s and early ’70s. Longevity of excellence isn’t the point here, just peak incandescence.
This is a terrific start for a series that may live up to the promise of The Twilight Zone: it will take you “on a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
Based on the YA series by Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil offers little that is new about the adventures of discontented adolescents.
Every few years a smart teen rom-com comes along that deftly puts a modern, and pleasingly iconoclastic, spin on a classic piece of literature.
The nine-part film series focuses on the artist in his studio in Johannesburg. We see William Kentridge as he draws, paints, designs, paces the floor, and thinks out loud — among other things.
Ramy’s drama takes a backseat to those of his relatives and friends, and that ends up expanding the reach and power of the series.
There are cringe-worthy moments as well as scenes of mesmerizing beauty in Disney’s live-action Pinocchio. But I’ll go against the critical grain and argue, for several small reasons, and for one big one, that it was necessary to make it.
Television is the new art cinema, chock full of superb examples of storytelling across multiple genres.
Culture Commentary: World War II Was a Race War, and It Isn’t Over
It isn’t exactly news that the genocide of Native Americans was a model for Hitler, but it hit with fresh force in The U.S. and the Holocaust.
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