Author: Max Rider

Director David Lynch attends the Twin Peaks screening during the 70th annual Cannes Film Festival. (Image has been converted to black and white.)  (Photo by Amy T. Zielinski/Getty Images) The late, great David Lynch is being remembered as one of the most influential American auteurs, and for good reason. With tributes coming in from across the industry, his impact on film has clearly been vast and inarguable. And though Lynch embodied American experimental film since his debut film, Eraserhead, in 1977 and garnered awards for movies like Mulholland Drive and Wild at Heart (as well as an Honorary Academy Award),…

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx in Back In Action. John Wilson/Courtesy of Netflix Although Hollywood is currently entangled in a torrid love affair with spy stories, not every tryst is going to satisfy. Back in Action, a long-anticipated Netflix espionage flick that marks Cameron Diaz’s return to the screen, makes its best effort, drawing on all sorts of genre cliches, but ultimately fails to land a conclusive punch.  BACK IN ACTION ★★ (2/4 stars)Directed by: Seth GordonWritten by: Seth Gordon, Brendan O’BrienStarring: Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou, Kyle Chandler, Glenn CloseRunning time: 93 mins. The film comes courtesy…

Clockwise from top: Michael Jackson and Bob Dylan in The Greatest Night in Pop; Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels in Kings From Queens; June Carter Cash in June: The June Carter Cash Story. Courtesy of Netflix; Courtesy of Peacock;  The Grammy Awards are justly famed for getting it wrong a whole lot of the time. But one longstanding category, Best Music Film, has quietly but frequently gotten it right. In 1984, when the category debuted, it was called Best Longform Video, intended for both collections of MTV-ready clips—such as the inaugural winner, Duran Duran, a compendium of…

John Glover’s Eat the Document is based on Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel about New Left activists. Maria Baranova-Suzuki Prototype, the festival of new opera-theater and music-theater from Beth Morrison Projects and Here, presented a dizzyingly diverse spectrum of performances in 2025. Overall, the festival came off like last year’s Mets’ playoff season, with wildly divergent highs and lows. It encompassed some of the most exciting theater this city has seen in the past twelve months, alongside shows representing some of the more moribund tendencies in the contemporary avant-garde. While no single quality stood out, a handful of themes emerged. Firstly,…

Kristen Sieh and Amelia Workman in The Antiquities Emilio Madrid Science fiction assumes many forms, but it generally has to feature some jump in evolution or gear. Novelty in tech or nature is key. Funny that the genre itself has mutated very little in the past century. You say the machines we build will try to replace us? Humanity will perish but our metal babies will preserve our legacy? From Karel Čapek to Kubrick to Black Mirror, storytellers have shown us fear in a handful of microchips. Sci-fi may be rarer in theater, but the burden of newness still rests…

Mark Moses and Melissa Gilbert in Still Maria Baranova-Suzuki Melissa Gilbert is an actress who has at least tried to go through life acting her age. She debuted at two, doing Alpo dog food commercials with Lorne Greene, and landed her first TV series at nine, playing the subteen-and-beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder, the little Minnesota farm girl who grew up in your living room from 1974 to 1984 on NBC’s Little House on the Prairie. That’s the role that made an indelible impression on the minds of most people, and it’s the one with the strongest staying-power, hardest to shake.…

Soprano Symone Harcum in her Opera Philadelphia debut as Léontine in The Anonymous Lover. Photo by Johanna Austin A multiracial musician who rose to the heights of society in pre-revolution France, a virtuoso violinist and champion fencer, a military commander, and, most of all, a composer, Joseph Bologne was an exceedingly interesting person in his time and now. Much of his music survives, including some elegant violin concerti, string quartets, and symphonies. It’s a shame, then, that we have only one opera of his, and, in a different way, a shame that that opera is L’amant anonyme (here presented in…

Quintessa Swindell and Leo Woodall star in Prime Target. Courtesy of Apple TV+ Press Despite its high-minded plot, Prime Target is the kind of show that you can turn your brain off for. The series combines international intrigue, government conspiracies and a handful of action-adjacent sequences to make a serviceable, if predictable, thriller. You’ll undoubtedly see worse television this year, but that bad TV will almost certainly be more memorable. Prime Target starts with an interesting enough concept: Cambridge post grad Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall) is a brilliant theoretical mathematician, and his research is being watched by several interested parties.…

Put these new releases on your 2025 reading this. Courtesy the publishers If reading more was your New Year’s resolution, but you haven’t cracked open a single book, look no further than our must-read non-fiction picks for 2025. These are some of the best new releases—a list that includes a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s reimagining of contemporary criticism and a kaleidoscopic retelling of Princess Diana’s real life and enduring legacy. We promise these non-fiction titles are anything but boring and will have you roused (as with the damning tell-all on the machinations of Spotify) and engrossed (as with the encyclopedic work…

A good book will never make you regret swiping right. Courtesy the publishers It’s that time of year again—the inbox floods with gift guides, social feeds turn pink and red, and restaurants start charging exorbitant prices for a three-course meal in the name of romance. Whether you love it, loathe it, or simply tolerate it, Valentine’s Day is inescapable. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy into the frenzy. If you’re flying solo this February 14, consider this your official permission slip to skip the prix fixe menus, ignore the heart-shaped everything and settle in with the best companion…