“Old Guy” is billed as an action movie but it is actually more of a fantasy film. It imagines a world in which an aging hit man kills his targets without consequence before retreating to nightclubs where scads of beautiful young women compete to accompany him home. Presumably Danny Dolinski (Christoph Waltz) has been enjoying … Read more
The Danish heist thriller “The Quiet Ones” centers on a big score that involves using garbage trucks to block the major roads in Copenhagen to buy the thieves enough time to raid a cash-handling firm. The many moving parts get the better of the filmmakers. The director, Frederik Louis Hviid, opens the movie with a … Read more
Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning writer and director who became the first Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84. His death was confirmed by François Margolin, a French film producer and a close friend of Mr. Cissé’s. Mr. Cissé had just … Read more
Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Last week saw the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” the collaborative album from Drake and the Toronto R&B singer and songwriter PartyNextDoor, a longtime collaborator. For the most part, the sound is a vintage one for Drake, feeling something like a retreat … Read more
The title character in “The Unbreakable Boy” is a whirlwind, a handful, a lot. Austin, an eighth grader with autism, is often in overdrive, whether he’s counting toys or rattling off the courtroom monologue from “A Few Good Men.” He also has a genetic brittle-bone disorder that frequently lands him in the emergency room. Crucially, … Read more
The British family that has steered the James Bond franchise for more than 60 years, zealously protecting the superspy from the indignities of Hollywood strip mining, has agreed to relinquish control to Amazon. The deal, which was announced Thursday morning, comes after a behind-the-scenes standoff between Barbara Broccoli, who inherited control of Bond from her … Read more
Romance tropes tend to spark debate. Does “enemies to lovers” normalize bullying? Is “fake dating” overused? What’s hotter, “brother’s best friend” or “oops, there’s only one bed”? As a romance author, I try not to pick favorites. But as a reader, I will boldly claim “second-chance romance” as the elite trope. There’s just something so … Read more
IN 1988, THE artist Lucas Samaras moved into the 62nd floor of what was then a new white-glove condo building on West 56th Street, an 814-foot-tall concrete high-rise that real estate agents have since named CitySpire. The block, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, is another fairly nondescript corporate street in Midtown Manhattan; perhaps the most … Read more
Wood isn’t one to let an opportunity slip through his fingers. “I ain’t from the land of dreams,” he told me this past fall. He was raised in Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., and his father was Roy Wood Sr., a radio-journalism pioneer who reported on Black platoons in Vietnam, South African apartheid and the … Read more
