Author: Max Rider

Daisy Ridley in Cleaner. Courtesy of Quiver Distribution Daisy Ridley has so much promise. She’s a talented, thoughtful actress who galvanized fans as Rey in three Star Wars films (with more to come). She’s good at action and equally skilled with quieter, emotional scenes. But in recent years, Ridley has not always had the best luck selecting projects. Her turn last year as real-life swimmer Gertrude Ederle in The Young Woman and the Sea was notably strong, but movies like Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Marsh King’s Daughter and Magpie haven’t done Ridley much justice. Enter Cleaner, perhaps now…

Robert Pattinson as the clones Mickey 18 and Mickey 17 in Mickey 17. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Moviegoers at the 75th Berlin Film Festival were seeing double over the weekend during the International Premiere of Mickey 17. Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic satire stars Robert Pattinson as one of a series of expendable clones whose sole purpose is to die and be reprinted—again and again and again. The multiples would have been helpful on Saturday night’s red carpet, as the singular Pattinson happily signed autographs and indefatigably posed for at least a dozen selfies with fervent fans crowding the barricades in…

The Caravaggio Syndrome is now available in English after several reprints in Italy. Courtesy the publisher In 1817, while visiting Florence, Stendhal was seized with fierce palpitations of the heart after leaving Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel in the Church of Santa Croce. He wrote in his book, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio: “I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” In 2018, at the Uffizi, a tourist stood in front of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and suffered a heart attack. A few years earlier, the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini had diagnosed this condition, naming…

From left: Paul Shaffer, Scarlett Johansson, Alex Moffat, Emil Wakim, Chloe Fineman, James Austin John, Paul Rudd, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Devon Walker, Taran Killem, Ana Gasteyer, John Mulaney, Kristen Wiig, Kenan Thompson, Pete Davidson, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Sarah Sherman, Will Forte, Jason Sudeikis, David Spade, Adam Driver, Kyle Mooney, Cecily Strong, Beck Bennett, and Nick Jonas. Theo Wargo/NBC Fifty seasons, thousands of sketches and 894 hosts (two of whom have committed murder, per Steve Martin and John Mulaney) later, and Saturday Night Live is still going strong. Touted on the red carpet pre-show as “the biggest cast reunion in TV…

From left: Anisa Harris as Teen Robin, Vanessa Prasad as Teen Gen, Jenna Burgess as Teen Melissa, Sophie Nélisse as Teen Shauna, Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa, Liv Hewson as Teen Van, Courtney Eaton as Teen Lottie, Nia Sondaya as Teen Akilah, Samantha Hanratty as Teen Misty, Kevin Alves as Teen Travis and Silvana Estifanos as Teen Britt in Yellowjackets Season 3. Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME The second season of Yellowjackets concluded with a fire and a death, one disaster in each of the Showtime series’ two timelines. Both events sent catastrophic ripples through the storylines that linger in…

Idina Menzel in Redwood. Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman Idina Menzel: still defying gravity. Twenty-odd years after Wicked, the indomitable diva won’t stay earthbound on a Broadway stage. But instead of wowing Oz astride a broomstick, Menzel’s strapped into a climbing harness, vaulting off the trunk of a mammoth redwood, twisting, twirling—and tickling the stratosphere with E-flats. As always, Menzel is pure magic. The show around her? So wooden. I don’t care how balsa-weak that joke is (will I be the 14th hack to use it, or the only one lacking self-restraint?). Redwood rhymes with deadwood, the derogatory term for…

Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Gorge. Courtesy AppleTV+ The best kind of story starts with a compelling “What if…?” The premise behind The Gorge, courtesy of screenwriter Zach Dean, is exceptionally promising. A massive, fog-covered crevice, located in an unknown country, is protected by two watchtowers, one manned by the Russians and one by the British and American governments. A single sniper is assigned to each tower for exactly a year, but the two never interact with each other. Their sole mission is to contain whatever is inside the gorge—a mystery that leaves ample space for imagination under…

Anthony Mackie in Captain America: Brave New World. Courtesy of Marvel/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Marvel Fatigue has been a thing long enough that we’re now experiencing “Marvel Fatigue Fatigue,” in that critics and lapsed fans like myself are not only tired of Marvel movies, we’re tired of complaining about them. I’d hoped—though not expected—that Captain America: Brave New World might shake me from my Marvel malaise. After all, it’s been nearly a decade since the last film installment in the Cap franchise, and Brave New World is the first film in which the former Falcon, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie),…

David Morgans, Melina Jaharis, Jeremy Harr and Nathaniel Sullivan in Salome. Photo: Andrew Boyle Almost everyone in Salome wants something they shouldn’t. A king desires his stepdaughter, a servant desires a princess and a princess desires a prisoner with equal parts fascination and repulsion. We, too, look upon them all with horror and a shameful allure, seduced as much by Strauss’s score as by Salome herself. It is a nasty piece of work but a depiction of desires too powerful to be contained. Strauss’s opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s shocking play, is about desire and depravity, but even more…

From left: Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in The White Lotus Season 3. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO No matter the season, there are a few things fans can be sure of when it comes to The White Lotus: a gorgeous location, an unknown corpse, and a giant ensemble cast of some of the best character actors in the game. Fans have a few other guarantees too, like those actors primarily playing rich people who fall somewhere between insane and insufferable on the out-of-touch spectrum, or mundane dramas and disagreements snowballing into death and…