Uneasy Lies the Head of Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s Epic The Crown

Netflix’s The Crown, a drama series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, is the kind of sumptuous but tasteful British royals porn you’d expect from Ye Olde Masterpiece Theatre, not from the streaming giant that gave us BoJack Horseman and Stranger Things. A $130 million joint American/British…

Westworld and the Gamification of Who Gets to Be Human

A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…

Seriously, Dan Brown Deserves Better Than Inferno

I’m not afraid to admit that I get a kick out of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers. Yes, they’re indifferently plotted and predictably written. But I’m a sucker for ludicrous, centuries-spanning conspiracies and indulgent faux-gnosticism. The books serve, if nothing else, as gripping tours through art-world apocrypha, and Brown’s know-it-all…

Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog Never Transcends Pulp Nihilism

Edward Bunker’s novel Dog Eat Dog (1996) kicks off with a disgusting sequence in which a two-bit criminal named Gerald “Mad Dog” McCain — caught up in a cocaine binge that Bunker describes in beat-by-beat detail across several pages — stabs his girlfriend and her daughter to death in a…

The Handmaiden Transcends Its Male-Gaze Sensuality

When Sarah Waters published her gothic lesbian suspense novel Fingersmith in early 2002, the U.S. was beginning a relatively speedy transformation on the LGBT front, building to today’s legalized same-sex marriage and a presidential candidate’s full-throated support for expanded LGBT rights. Buoyed by that shift, Waters’ story of clandestine female lovers…

Werner Herzog Takes a Scattershot Look Into the Inferno

An archeologist, a North Korean dictator, a Norse god, two photographers, the people of Indonesia and a tribal chief who believes Jesus is actually black American WWII soldier John Frum all look into a volcano and see their fates. That’s not the beginning of a joke; it’s the premise of…

A Defense of Oasis, on the Occasion of the Riotous Documentary Supersonic

America never understood Oasis’ hugeness. By that I don’t just mean the band’s epochal mid-’90s global popularity or the nationalistic fervor it stirred in the U.K. I mean, simply, its hugeness of sound. In the States, only the ballads connected, the glorious/meaningless Beatle raptures “Wonderwall,” “Live Forever” and “Champagne Supernova”…

On the Screen, American Pastoral Loses Its Rich Sweep

“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…