Arts & Culture

Miss Sloane opens with a clever gambit: Jessica Chastain’s face fills the screen in a tight close-up as she talks about strategy, breaking the fourth wall. From its opening minutes, the audience is put at the mercy of a charismatic figure and forced to piece together what she might represent…

Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home examines, in its uncertain prose, one of the signal concerns of our age: How do those of us who have grown up in relative comfort square our good luck with the lot of the rest of the world? That question gets feinted at…

Watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing sci-fi arthouse stunner, Evolution, I thought of the paintings of surrealist Rene Magritte — a few in particular: The Collective Invention (1934) and The Human Condition diptych (1933, 1935). The former features a creature — the bottom limbs of a woman and the body of a…

In the pantheon of American First Ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t push for policy, didn’t relinquish her pillbox hat to walk among the needy, didn’t travel to foreign countries as an ambassador and certainly didn’t advise her husband on matters of war. Jackie Kennedy’s role was…

In October, 200 coffee shops across the United States and Canada were made into Luke’s Diner for a day to promote the new revival of Gilmore Girls. No special signings or souvenirs — just the regular drink in a commemorative sleeve, served by the usual barista in a branded apron,…

Pablo Larraín is having a good year. The Chilean director, Oscar-nominated a few years ago for his 2012 political drama No, has just released Jackie, featuring a striking Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. He is also about to release Neruda, a complex,…

It’s December, which means it’s time to curl up in front of the TV in a fetal position and pray for 2017. Since this year has been Satan’s masturbatory fantasy, we deserve to glue our eyelids open and soak in the sweet, sweet escapism. And on January 1st, fortified by…

Eyeroll emoji.