God bless Glenn Danzig. He’s always been fully committed to his own idea of art, whether that’s been the full-steam-ahead punk rock of Misfits, the heavy metal of Danzig, or the extremity of his comic book company Verotik, a portmanteau of “violence” and “erotic.” But all of that has clearly been a prelude to his true…
Last season of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. ended on a moving and bittersweet note: Phil Coulson was dying, but he and Melinda May left the team to spend his final weeks (or possibly months) alive together on a remote beach, the romance they had put off for so long. By the time season six began a year later, she…
Madonna is modern pop’s original icon, someone whose music and influence will be shared, enjoyed, and debated for decades to come. A capital-S “Star” back when such a thing meant ubiquity without the aid of the internet, her style and substance were inseparable, the forward-thinking approach to both being an integral…
I know more about Too Old To Die Young’s plot from reading the press materials Amazon distributed than I got from watching nearly 150 minutes of it. The usual question a critic gets—“Should I start watching this TV show?”—is a lot harder to answer when you haven’t seen the first three-plus hours of it, either. I can…
Bruce Springsteen has spoken repeatedly about the influence of cinema on his music. Throughout the years, in numerous interviews (and his recent autobiography), he conjures impressions and memories of films that imprinted on his mind at a young age, and how the bold narratives and striking imagery of classics from the…
It might be time to reevaluate your superhero tactics when the most powerful collection of mutants on the planet get bested by a small group of talking animals. That’s the big takeaway from the domestic box office this weekend, where Dark Phoenix, the final chapter of the current iteration of the X-Men movie…
Actor, writer, director: Lake Bell has been at this long enough now that there’s only a vanishingly small chance you haven’t seen something she’s been involved with. From supporting turns in mainstream hits like It’s Complicated to roles in beloved cult TV like Children’s Hospital, Bojack Horseman, and Wet Hot…
The latest season of 3%, Netflix’s bold and adventurous dystopian parable, opens with intertitles that announce just how radically the series has reinvented its premise. “The world was divided into two sides,” they begin, reminding viewers of the literal and figurative gap between the elite and the masses that drove…
If you’re not a parent, congratulations: The odds are good that you’ve never heard the dastardly earworm known as “Baby Shark,” a YouTube video made by the folks at Pinkfong!, who apparently hate your sanity and want to shred it into tiny pieces. But soon, anyone foolish enough to go flipping channels and stumble upon…
In terms of television series, Doom Patrol is pretty out there. Based on a DC Comics property (specifically, the late-1980s iteration written by Grant Morrison), the show revolves around outcasts and weirdos of the superhero universe, people who see themselves not as superior beings, but unlucky souls cursed with…
[Spoilers for today’s episode of Jeopardy! if you haven’t seen it yet—and honestly, this early in the day? There’s almost no chance you have, we’re sorry to say.]
In the opening minutes of “Code Yellow,” Deke Shaw (Jeff Ward finally returning to the series) arises from his latest incarnation of The Framework, the virtual-reality environment created by Fitz and Holden Radcliffe that the time-traveler had originally rebuilt in the future. (It’s now a VR game called “Remorath…
Look, you should know what you’re getting into if you sit down to watch something called Swamp Thing. I certainly thought I did; I was never one to seek out the comics (though I do have a memory of tearing through iconoclastic comics writer Alan Moore’s run on it a long time ago), and my only direct experience with…
