Effective Date: 1 April 2021

We are BDG Media Inc. and W Media LLC (Bustle, we, us and our) and we operate the following websites (the Sites):

1. Bustle
2. Elite Daily
3. Flavorwire
4. Input
5. Inverse
6. Mic
7. Romper
8. The Zoe Report
9. Nylon
10. The Outline
11. W Magazine

We are committed to protecting your privacy. In this Privacy and Cookies Policy for our Sites, and the services, features, content or applications we offer, including our Content (defined below) (collectively with the Sites, the "Services"). We explain who we are, why and how we collect, store, share and use (together, "process") personal data ("Personal Information"), as well as your rights and how to contact us.

Bustle is a media company. We work across our Sites, our social media channels and/or other third party platforms to whom we licence content (referred to together in this policy as the “Bustle Digital Group”). We collect, receive, record, produce, store, publish and otherwise use or disseminate editorial, journalistic and/or commercial content (collectively, "Content"). As part of our media business, we may gather and/or receive information from a wide variety of sources (including without limitation from people, companies, organisations, events, meetings, public records, the Internet, filming, audio-recording, photography and social and other media, and other published content or documents). We may publish, disseminate, make available and/or share Content via the Bustle Digital Group ("Publishing" or "Published Content"). Publishing is carried out in multiple ways (including via online articles, video, audio-visual pieces, photographs, newsletters, archives and social media) and about diverse topics. Content may sometimes include Personal Information. Not all Content we process is Published.

Please read this policy carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal information and how we will treat it.

By engaging with our Services, you acknowledge you have read and understood this privacy policy.

We are the data controller of the personal information processed in relation to this policy, except where this policy explains otherwise. This means we are responsible for treating your personal information safely, in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws. If you have any questions about how we protect your Personal Information, please contact us at info@bustle.com.

What Does This Privacy Policy Cover?

This Privacy Policy covers how we treat:

• Personal Information gathered when you are using or accessing our Services.
• Personal Information that our business partners share with us or that we share with our business partners.
• Personal Information in any Content.

Our Services may, from time to time, contain links to external websites. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies.

Third Party Services

This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own or control, including but not limited to: any third party websites, services and applications and any affiliated brands (“Third Party Services”) that you elect to access through the Service or to individuals that we do not manage or employ. We do not have any responsibility or liability for these policies or any content on Third Party Services and do not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. We have no control over the availability of any of those Third Party Services. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of any Third Party Services you access. Please refer to Information You Elect to Share for further information.

What Information Do We Collect?

We process information about you in the following contexts:

Category: Sign-up Information (Newsletters and Text Messages)

Context

• When you sign up to one of our newsletters or to receive text messages from us, you will provide us with your email address or phone number. If you sign-up by providing your email address through Facebook, we will get your email address from Facebook. That's it, we don't ask for anything extra.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We share newsletters or text messages with individuals who consent to receive such communications. We also have a legitimate interest in sharing information about our Sites.

Category: Subscription Information (Magazine Subscriptions)

Context

• When you sign up to receive a physical or electronic magazine subscription from one of our publications, you may provide us with your account number, name, title, company name, address, city, state, zip, country, phone number, email address and phone number.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We collect this information to fulfil our subscription contracts with consumers and distribute physical and/or digital copies of our publications(s). We also have a legitimate interest in collecting this information in order to distribute our publication(s). In addition, in some contexts, we collect this information based upon your consent.

Category: Competition, Digital Events, and other Giveaways Information

Context

• If you enter one of our competitions, sign up for one of our digital events, or participate in other giveaways, you agree to the relevant competition or event terms, and may provide us with your first and last name, age, email address, phone number, postal code and any further information listed in the relevant sign up form. You may also need to provide us with further information to verify your identity if you win.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in operating competitions and digital events. In some contexts, we are also required by law to collect information about those that enter our competitions, and we have a legitimate interest in complying with those laws.

Category: Contact Information

Context

• If you email us, you provide us with your email address, and any other information you choose to provide (for example, your name or information in your email signature).

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in communicating with you about our Sites.

Category: Social Media Information

Context

• If you follow us on another website or platform, we generally do not get any Personal Information about you from them.
• However, if you engage with us on another website or platform, for example by leaving a comment on our page, we can view these comments via that relevant website or platform. Similarly, if you message us directly on another website or platform, we will have access to the Personal Information you have chosen to provide to us via that relevant website or platform (for example, if you send us a picture) – we don't, however, copy or store that information anywhere else.
• Please refer to the relevant other website or platform's terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in reviewing comments left on our social media pages, and in responding to messages we receive on social platforms.

Category: Technical Information about Your Visit

Context

• We use this for marketing and advertising analysis, including providing more relevant advertising on our Sites.
• We may also receive a confirmation when you open and engage with an email from us.
• Technical information may include the partial Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform;
• Information about your visit may include the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL), clickstream to, through and from our Platform (including date and time), page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), methods used to browse away from the page, and potentially any social media handle used to connect with our team. While we collect and store IP address information, this information is not made public and is pseudonymised.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in understanding how you interact with our website to better improve it, and to understand your preferences and interests in order to select offerings that you might find most useful. We also have a legitimate interest in detecting and preventing fraud. We also have a legitimate interest in monitoring our networks and the visitors to our websites. Among other things, it helps us understand which of our services is the most popular.

Category: Content

Context

• As part of our editorial, journalistic and/or commercial activities in relation to Content, we may receive, collect, store, analyse, Publish, use and otherwise disseminate or process (in any media) personal data for the purposes of and/or in connection with our Publishing activities.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• As a media company that publishes editorial content, we have a legitimate interest in Publishing content that may include personal information.

Category: Recordings

Context

• As part of the process of receiving, gathering, producing and/or creating Content, we may conduct filming (including audio and video recording and photography) in a studio or other private location, and/or in public places.
• Our recording will include you if you have agreed to be in or provide Content, and may also include you when we are filming in places and you have entered the area.
• In some cases, we may enter into contracts and/or releases with individual or corporate sources or providers of information or those who give us access to locations or information or with whom with have commercial or editorial partnerships. Such contracts and/or releases may be for editorial and/or commercial purposes. Where these apply, they will generally explain how we use any relevant data.
• We may record your likeness, including your name, image, biography, résumé, voice, sounds, actions or performances.
• When filming Content in public places, we will generally post Filming Notices around the area to let you know that filming is occurring, and that if you enter the area that you may be photographed and recorded and your likeness may appear in our Content without credit or compensation. Where our journalists are filming in public and at live events, we may not be using Filming Notices. If you do not wish to be filmed, photographed or recorded, you should not enter any area in which filming is happening – if you do so it is your responsibility to inform our journalist(s) or other Bustle staff onsite & involved in the filming], but it may not be possible to entirely exclude your image and/or voice from the Content, despite any request made.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in making recordings as a part of our content-generating process. In some circumstances, this collection may also be based upon consent.

Category: Information Provided When Submitting Content

Context

• We may from time to time ask you (and our readers generally) to submit your own text, video and/or audio recordings and/or photography to us. If you respond to one of our submission requests, you'll be providing us with the contact details from which you make your submission (e.g. email address or online handle), and any additional information you provide alongside it (for example, extra information about a video). Where you provide information to us for media purposes, including by communicating with one of our editorial team or providing them with information (including by making your information available), you acknowledge that we may process this information including with a view to Publication. If you have any concerns about confidentiality when responding to one of our submission requests, please email us at info@bustle.com. Please read the rest of this policy carefully, including in particular the information about How Is My Information Used? and How long we keep your information.
• We may receive video and/or audio recordings or photography which other individuals submit to us, for example videos of public events.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We process this information based upon your consent.

Category: Email Interconnectivity

Context

• If you receive email from us, we use certain tools to capture data related to when you open our message, click on any links or banners it contains and make purchases.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in understanding how you interact with our communications to you.

Category: Feedback/Support

Context

• If you provide us feedback or contact us for support we will collect your name and e-mail address, as well as any other content that you send to us, in order to reply.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in receiving, and acting upon, your feedback or issues.

Category: Mobile Devices

Context

• We collect information from your mobile device such as unique identifying information broadcast from your device when visiting our website.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in identifying unique visitors, and in understanding how users interact with us on their mobile devices.

Category: Partner Promotions

Context

• We collect information that you provide as part of a co-branded promotion with another company.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in fulfilling our promotions.

Category: Applicants

Context

• If you apply for a job, we may collect your name and contact information, along with a copy of your resume, work history or work authorization information.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in reviewing candidates for potential jobs.

Category: Independent Contractors

Context

• We collect information from you if you work for us as an independent contractor, or if we contract with you for services. We may collect your name, address, email address, social security number, bank account information, and demographic information.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in utilizing independent contractors to perform services. We also collect this information to fulfil our contracts with independent contractors.

Category: Surveys

Context

• When you participate in a survey we collect information that you provide through the survey. If the survey is provided by a third party service provider, the third party’s privacy policy applies to the collection, use, and disclosure of your information.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in understanding your opinions, and collecting information relevant to our organization.

Category: Location Data

Context

• We collect information through the Sites as to your real time location to provide location services where requested or agreed to by you in order to deliver content, advertising or other services that are dependent on knowing where you are.
• Delivery of location services will involve reference to one or more of the following: (a) the coordinates (latitude/longitude) of your location; (b) look-up of your country of location by reference to your IP address against public sources; and/or (c) potentially your Identifier for Advertisers (IFA) code for your Apple device, or the Android ID for your Android device, or a similar device identifier.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in understanding our users and providing tailored services. In some contexts our use is also based upon your consent to provide us with geo location information.

Category: Cookies and first party tracking

Context

• We use cookies and clear GIFs. “Cookies” are small pieces of information that a website sends to a computer’s hard drive while a web site is viewed. This information can be used to identify your IP address. See our Cookie Policy for more information.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in making our website operate efficiently.

Category: Cookies and Third Party Tracking

Context

• We participate in behavior-based advertising, this means that a third party uses technology (e.g., a cookie) to collect information about your use of our website so that they can provide advertising about products and services tailored to your interests on our website, or on other websites. See our Cookie Policy for more information.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in engaging in behavior-based advertising and capturing website analytics.

Category: Information Provided by E-Commerce Platforms

Context

• In some jurisdictions, our e-commerce platforms allow you to shop and make purchases directly from our Services. These platforms may provide us with your name and email address. We may use this information to send you communications relevant to your interests. We do not collect credit card or other payment processing information from these platforms.

Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data

• We have a legitimate interest in sending you offers and communications that may be relevant to you.

We may also use the above information for internal administrative purposes.

In addition to the information that we collect from you directly, we may also receive information about you from other sources, including third parties, business partners, our affiliates, or publicly available sources.

Who is my information shared with?

Information Shared with Our Service Providers:

We employ and contract with people and other entities that perform certain tasks on our behalf (our “service providers”).

We may share Personal Information with our service providers in order to provide our Services to you. Unless we tell you otherwise, our service providers may only use Personal Information we share with them in in accordance with our instructions.

Our service providers include:

• Customer support and engagement software & services
• Cloud storage hosting and providers
• Newsletter and email marketing providers
• Subscription fulfilment companies
• Advertising and marketing partners

LiveRamp:

When you use our website, we share information that we collect from you, such as your email (in hashed form), IP address or information about your browser or operating system, with our service provider, LiveRamp Inc. LiveRamp returns an online identification code that we may store in our first-party cookie for our use in online and cross-channel advertising and it may be shared with advertising companies to enable interest-based and targeted advertising. To opt out of sharing with LiveRamp, please click here (https://optout.liveramp.com/opt_out).

Aggregate Information

Aggregate information does not include any personal information which you can be identified from. We share aggregate information with our partners, service providers and other persons with whom we conduct business. We share this type of statistical data so that our partners can understand how and how often people use our Services and their services or websites, which facilitates improving both their services and how our Services interface with them.

In addition, these third parties may share with us anonymised, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information about you that they have independently developed or acquired.

Content & Recordings

We may share our Content across Bustle Digital Group and third party distribution channels. Our Content may be seen globally by our users and viewers, including users of the Internet and/or social media platforms, as well as third parties’ platforms and channels who license or purchase our Content.

We may also disclose your personal information to:

• Any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, who support our processing of personal data under this policy (if any of these parties are using your information for direct marketing purposes, we will only transfer the information to them for that purpose with your prior consent); and
• Third-party sites or platforms, such as social networking sites and third party distribution channels.
• Organisations and individuals who are responsible, in whole or in part, for the production and/or distribution of the Content. This includes film crews, producers, editors and others involved in the foregoing.

Other Disclosures We May Make

We will disclose your personal information to third parties if we buy or sell part of our (or another) business, or if we are required to do so in order to comply with a legal obligation.

Information Disclosed Pursuant to Business Transfers

In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if we, or substantially all of our assets, were acquired, or if we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of us or our assets may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.

Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others

We also reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary to (i) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (ii) enforce the Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (iv) respond to user support requests (as explained above), or (v) protect our rights, property or safety, our users and the public. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for fraud protection and to prevent cybercrime, including spam/malware prevention.

Information Shared with our Business Partners

We may offer contests, sweepstakes, or other promotions with third party partners. If you decide to enter a contest, sweepstakes, or promotion that is sponsored by a third party partner, the information you provide will be shared with us and with them. Their use of this information is not governed by this Policy.

Information We Share With Your Consent

We may ask if you would like us to share your information with other unaffiliated third parties who are not described elsewhere in this policy.

Information You Elect to Share

You may access other Third Party Services, including other websites and platforms, through the Services for example by clicking on links to those Third Party Services from within the Site. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and/or practices of these Third Party Services, and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services’ privacy policies. This Privacy Policy only governs information collected as part of our Services.

Public Information about Your Activity on the other websites or platforms

Where you engage with Bustle accounts on other third-party websites or platforms (for example, social media), some of your activity may be public by default. This may include, but is not limited to, content you have posted publicly on those websites or otherwise through the Services, such as written posts, comments, or other submissions by you. Please also remember that if you choose to provide Personal Information using certain public features of other websites or platforms, then that information is governed by the privacy settings of those other websites or platforms and may be publicly available. Individuals reading such information may use or disclose it to other individuals or entities without our control and without your knowledge, and search engines may index that information. We therefore urge you to think carefully about including any specific information you may deem private in content that you submit when engaging with Bustle on other websites or platforms.

Is Information About Me Secure?

We store all of our information, including your IP address information, using industry-standard techniques.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. We do our best to protect your personal information, but we cannot guarantee or warrant that such techniques will prevent unauthorised access to information about you that we store, Personal Information or otherwise; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. In the event that we are required by law to inform you of a breach to your personal information we may notify you electronically, in writing, or by telephone, if permitted to do so by law.

Our original recordings are kept on secure, password, protected servers or networks. However, our Content is posted publicly on the internet. Published Content will made freely available via the internet where it is not subject to additional security measures.

We may operate registration and/or paywalls in relation to Content. Some of those Sites may permit you to create an account. When you do, you will be prompted to create a password. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password, and you are responsible for any access to or use of your account by someone else that has obtained your password, whether or not such access or use has been authorized by you. You should notify us of any unauthorized use of your password or account.

Where do you store my information?

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA) that may not be subject to equivalent Data Protection Law.

Bustle may also record Content in the EEA, the UK, the US, and in other countries around the world. Your personal information which we record or otherwise receive or collect is sent to and stored on secure servers located in the United States. Such storage is necessary in order to process the information.

Where your information is transferred outside the EEA, we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is subject to appropriate safeguards, such as relying on a recognised legal adequacy mechanism, and that it is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.

We may transfer your personal information outside the EEA, including but not limited to, the following reasons:

• in order to store it.
• in order to enable us to provide goods or services to you and fulfil our contract with you. This includes order fulfilment, processing of payment details, and the provision of support services.
• where we are legally required to do so.
• in order to facilitate the operation of our group of businesses, where it is in our legitimate interests and we have concluded these are not overridden by your rights.

We may transfer your personal information to the following countries and entities outside the EEA:

Zendesk, Inc: Privacy Shield

AWS: Privacy Shield

Datto, Inc (Backupify): Privacy Shield

Google LLC: Privacy Shield

How long we keep your information

If you have subscribed to any of our newsletters, we retain Personal Information for as long as you remain subscribed. If you opt-out, we will retain only the minimum information needed to make sure you don't receive any unwanted communications from us.

We retain any first-party cookie information as set out in our Cookies section.

We may also retain aggregate information beyond this time for research purposes and to help us develop and improve our services. You cannot be identified from aggregate information retained or used for these purposes.

Content & Recordings

Content, including Recordings, and other information associated with Content (including but not limited to talent and other release agreements) is retained for:

• as long as is necessary in order to produce Content, and/or with a view to Publication, and/or
• for as long as the Content is Published on or through Bustle Digital Group.

Where we have a contract (including any image, rights or other release) with you, we may retain Content (and related personal data):

• in accordance with and for the length of any contract between us and you, including in order to meet our contractual obligations to you,
• for a period of time following any contract to produce and Publish our Content, maintain documentation of how we produced our Content, identify any issues and resolve any legal proceedings, and/or
• for as long as the relevant Content is available on or through Bustle Digital Group.

Our Content is Published on or through Bustle Digital Group, and will generally remain available on Bustle Digital Group for as long as Bustle continues to produce, Publish and store its Content.

Content and other information associated with it (including but not limited to talent and other release agreements) whether or not Published is retained by us, and may be used for Publishing in the future.

Our Guidelines and Policies

All Content, recordings (used and unused), and other information associated with the relevant Content (including but not limited to talent and other release agreements) are stored in accordance with our Content Library guidelines.

What Choices Do I Have Regarding My Information?

You can always opt not to disclose certain information to us, even though it may be needed to take advantage of some of our features (e.g. newsletter sign-ups).

Your rights

• You have the right, under certain circumstances:
• to be provided with a copy of your Personal Information held by us;
• to request the correction or deletion of your Personal Information held by us;
• to request that we restrict the processing of your Personal Information (while we verify or investigate your concerns with this information, for example);
• to request that your provided Personal Information be moved to a third party;
• to object to the further processing of your Personal Information in some circumstances; and
• to stop receiving text messages from us, if you signed up to receive such messages.

Your right to unsubscribe to text messages:

If you signed up to receive text messages from us, you may unsubscribe at any time. You may opt out of text message by replying STOP.

Your right to withdraw consent:

Where the processing of your personal information by us is based on consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent without detriment at any time by contacting us at info@bustle.com. You can also change your marketing preferences at any time as described in Our promotional updates and communications' section;

Please be aware that recordings made pursuant to an agreement between us and you (whether written, or when you enter an area we have posted Filming Notices around to let you know that filming is occurring), or, generally, any recordings made in public are not based on consent.

Your right to request correction or deletion:

• If you ask us to correct or delete your information, we’ll generally take steps to correct or delete your information as soon as we can where practicable, depending on the circumstances.
• In some circumstances, your right to deletion may be limited by applicable law, including where it must be balanced against our legitimate interests (taking into account the right of freedom of expression and information), and this may outweigh your rights. If your request relates to Content, for example, your right to deletion may not apply. However, we will consider each request in context.
• Depending on the circumstances, we may be entitled to retain, Publish and/or otherwise process Content for as long as is required for the purpose it was collected it for, or for similar, compatible purposes, including producing Content and our journalism. Some information may also remain in archived/backup copies for our records, or as otherwise required by law.
• If you have a particular concern about your personal information, please contact us to discuss this at info@bustle.com

You can exercise the rights listed above at any time by contacting us at info@bustle.com or toll-free at 1-888-908-0709.

If your request or concern is not satisfactorily resolved by us, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory body, (see http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.html).

Note that, as required by law, we will require you to prove your identity. We may verify your identity by phone call or email. Depending on your request, we will ask for information such as your name and email address. We may also ask you to provide a signed declaration confirming your identity. Following a request, we will use reasonable efforts to supply, correct or delete personal information about you in our files.

In some circumstances, you may designate an authorized agent to submit requests to exercise certain privacy rights on your behalf. We will require verification that you provided the authorized agent permission to make a request on your behalf. You must provide us with a copy of the signed permission you have given to the authorized agent to submit the request on your behalf and verify your own identity directly with us. If you are an authorized agent submitting a request on behalf of an individual you must attach a copy of the following information to the request:

1. A completed Authorized Agent Designation Form indicating that you have authorization to act on the consumer’s behalf.
2. If you are a business, proof that you are registered with the Secretary of State to conduct business in California.

If we do not receive both pieces of information, the request will be denied.

Freedom of expression and information:

Your data protection rights must be reconciled with the rights of freedom of expression and information. Where our processing of personal data is for journalistic purposes or for the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression, your rights to the protection of your personal data may not apply or may be outweighed by the rights to freedom of expression or information and/or our legitimate interests or rights.

The Information Commissioner is the supervisory authority in the UK and can provide further information about your rights and our obligations in relation to your Personal Information, as well as deal with any complaints that you have about our processing of your Personal Information.

Your California Privacy Rights: If you are a California resident:

California Civil Code Sections 1798.115(c), 1798.130(a)(5)(c), 1798.130(c), and 1798.140 indicate that organizations should disclose whether certain categories of information are collected, “sold” or transferred for an organization’s “business purpose” (as those terms are defined under California law). You can find a list of the categories of information that we collect and share here. Please note that because this list is comprehensive it may refer to types of information that we share about people other than you. Under California Civil Code section 1798.83, California residents who would like more information concerning the categories of personal information (if any) we share with third parties or affiliates for those parties to use for direct marketing, please submit a written request to us using the information in the "Contact Information" section below. This may not apply to information which comprises Content (i.e. as part of our journalistic and editorial activities).

We do not discriminate against California residents who exercise any of their rights described in this Privacy Policy.

Accessibility

This privacy policy is accessible through your browser’s audio reader.

What Happens When There Are Changes to this Privacy Policy?

This policy was last updated on 1 April 2021.

Any changes we make to this policy in future will be posted on this page. If we make any substantive changes, we will notify you by e-mail or through a pop-up within our Sites. Our privacy policy includes an “effective” and “last updated” date. The effective date refers to the date that the current version took effect. The last updated date refers to the date that the current version was last modified.

What If I Have Questions or Concerns?

If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, please send us a detailed message to info@bustle.com. We will make every effort to resolve your concerns.

Cookies and other technologies

IP Address Information and Other Information Collected Automatically:

We automatically receive and record information from your web browser when you interact with the Services, including your partial IP address and cookie information. This information is used for preventing cybercrime, including fighting spam/malware and also to facilitate collection of data concerning your interaction with the Services (e.g., what links you have clicked on).

Generally, the Services automatically collect usage information, such as the number and frequency of visitors to the Sites. We may use this data in aggregate form, that is, as a statistical measure, but not in a manner that would identify you personally. This type of aggregate data enables us and third parties authorised by us to figure out how often individuals use parts of the Services so that we can analyse and improve them.

Information Collected Using Cookies:

Cookies are pieces of text that may be provided to your computer through your web browser when you access a website. Your browser stores cookies in a manner associated with each website you visit. We use cookies to enable our servers to recognise your web browser and tell us how and when you visit the Sites and otherwise use the Services through the Internet.

Our cookies do not, by themselves, contain Personal Information, and we do not combine the general information collected through cookies with other Personal Information to tell us who you are. As noted, however, we do use cookies to identify that your web browser has accessed aspects of the Services and may associate that information with your web browser.

Most browsers have an option for turning off the cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your browser software) allowing you to decide on acceptance of each new cookie in a variety of ways. We strongly recommend that you leave cookies active, because they enable you to take advantage the most attractive features of the Services.

This Privacy Policy covers our use of cookies only and does not cover the use of cookies by third parties. We do not control when or how third parties place cookies on your computer. For example, third party websites to which a link points may set cookies on your computer.

Information Related to Advertising and the Use of Web Beacons:

To support and enhance the Services, we may serve advertisements, and also allow third parties to serve advertisements, through the Services. These advertisements are sometimes targeted and served to particular users and may come from third party companies called “ad networks.” Ad networks include third party ad servers, ad agencies, ad technology vendors and research firms.

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Last week, we ran our list of the 25 best movies of the year (and it’s right here, ICYMI), and it was a tough list to make – this year offered even more great films than usual, particularly in the indie and foreign space. So, in lieu of our customary list of new disc and streaming releases (since there aren’t really any to speak of anyway), we offer up this list of runners-up – all of which, conveniently enough, are available to stream at this very second, via your subscription services. It’s a waaaaaay lower stress way to spend your New Year’s Eve, and a hell of a lot cheaper too.

ON NETFLIX:

Atlantics: I’ve seldom seen a film reset its table as completely as Mati Diop’s French-Senegalese stunner, which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival; its opening passages seem those of a rich, slice-of-life portraiture, and Diop sets them up so well that when the genre elements appear, they’re genuinely startling. The filmmaker casts a dreamlike spell, and with dazzling resourcefulness (witness the simplicity of its visual razzle-dazzle, savvily calling up old-school devices like mirrors and trick lenses), yet never loses sight of the stakes and emotion of those early scenes. This is Diop’s first film. We will hear more from her.

I Lost My Body: The New York Film Critics Circle choice for the year’s best animated film is in French, but the subtitles barely matter; it tells its story with such visual intelligence, it may as well be a silent movie. It’s striking and stylish, and the opening scenes are splashed with visual comedy - concerning, as they do, the various travels of a severed hand. But the deeper this story goes, the more its layers reveal themselves; though a “cartoon,” it’s definitely not one for the kids. It’s grizzly and unnerving, and yet another startling indictment of “nice guys” and the stories they tell.

Shadow: The latest from director Zhang Yimou (Hero, The Great Wall) is a mixture of martial arts, mysticism, and gobsmacking images that I’d put among his best works. It showcases a beautifully, fully realized vision: he tells his story in the blacks and whites of traditional ink drawings, in sharp contrast to the sumptuous saturation of something like Curse of the Golden Flower. Of course, those blacks and whites are offset in the back half by the copious splashes of scarlet blood, which he also yields less like a fight choreographer than a visual artist — the battles are as much about patterns on the “page” as they are about hits and bruises, as much about aesthetics as they are about acrobatics. It’s a beautiful blast.

Dolemite is My Name: Rudy Ray Moore was a lot of things – stand-up comedian, R&B singer, movie producer, action hero – but the one thing he wasn’t was a guy who took “no” for an answer. Eddie Murphy stars as Moore in this affectionate biopic, which covers his rise from hack nightclub emcee to recording sensation, and the production of his first, low-budget big-screen vehicle, Dolemite. As they did in Ed Wood, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski adroitly capture the communal spirit of a no-budget film shoot, while director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) manages to replicate some of the gonzo energy of those scrappy little movies. But the real news here is Murphy’s delightful lead performance; in bringing this long-lost legend back to life, he seems to rediscover some of his own comic mojo.

American Factory: At first glance, the Fuyao glass company’s investment in a closed GM plant in Dayton, Ohio seemed like a win-win: here was a well-funded Chinese manufacturer, bringing jobs back to a decimated community. But these were non-union jobs at a much lower wage, with the company bringing in its own supervisors, many of its own workers, and its own way of doing things; tensions were probably inevitable. Those tensions, and their often-grim results, are masterfully captured by documentarians Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert; they craft a portrait that’s compelling, complicated, and often (paradoxically enough) very, very funny.

Paddleton: Few things on this earth were considered squarer than liking Everybody Loves Raymond, and sorry, guilty as charged; that series excelled in the increasingly rare form of the three-camera family comedy, and in had an invaluable asset in Ray Romano, whose oddball charisma and sprung timing came to full flower over its long run. It’s been a pleasure to watch him stretch in the years since, taking chances with more serious work like Men of a Certain Age, The Big Sick, and The Irishman, forming nuanced characters while maintaining the shaggy likability and crackerjack comic sensibility that makes him unique. And those qualities are on full display in this Netflix original, co-starring Mark Duplass (who co-writes with director Alex Lehmann) as Romano’s best buddy, who asks for his help taking his own life before terminal cancer does the job. It sounds bleak, yes. But their easy comic byplay keeps it from descending into misery, and the emotional truths of its closing passages are quietly shattering.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese: “I don’t remember a thing about Rolling Thunder!” Bob Dylan insists, early in this gleefully subversive documentary account of the 1975-1976 tour he mounted with friends and collaborators, before and after the release of Desire – “a con man, carny medicine show of old,” according to Allen Ginsberg, one of the participants. And it’s perhaps in that spirit of snake oil and flim-flammery (and of Dylan’s own lifelong station as an unreliable narrator) that Scorsese cheerfully intertwines fact and fiction, so that even true events are steeped in the fiction of recollection and preparation. On that tour, Dylan and company set out to make their own folk myths and tall tales – and the film gets into the same spirit. Dazzlingly entertaining, wryly funny, and filled with spirited, energetic, and LOUD performance footage that’s among the best of Dylan’s career.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

High Life: There’s something sort of delicious about imagining the Robert Pattinson fans, diehards from his Twilight days, heading to the art house a couple of times a year to get their minds melted by his latest collaboration with David Cronenberg or the Zellner brothers. But nothing they’ve seen will prepare them for this violent, disturbing, hyper-sexualized outer space drama from director Claire Denis, which begins with Pattinson and a baby all alone on a space station, and reveals the derailed prison experiment that put them there. The themes are grim and the images are unforgettable; it’s as uncompromising a work as one would expect from Denis, and that’s a high compliment indeed.

Transit: With his last film, Phoenix, writer/director Christian Petzold proved he could make a riveting and challenging WWII period picture. He undertakes a bold experiment with this adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1942 war novel: he tells her story, of fear and escape from the encroaching Germans during the war, but does so in contemporary settings, costumes, etc. It’s a peculiar choice that tracks intellectually but not always emotionally, and some viewers just might not be able to get past it. But those who do will find a quietly enthralling piece of work, filled with fine performances and moments of unexpected warmth, and some welcome French New Wave touches (particularly in its narration). And watch out for that ending; it’s a whammo.

Climax: You wouldn’t think notorious provocateur Gaspar Noé would make much of a movie musical director, but you’d be wrong; the opening dance sequence of his dark dance flick is absolutely electrifying, energetic and enthralling and sexy, and the long takes and wide overheads he deploys for subsequent dance breaks are inventive and often breathtaking. He tells the one-long-night story of a dance company’s post-rehearsal after-party, a “well, that escalated quickly” situation in which drugs, violence, and paranoia turn the banging rave to a screaming abattoir. Like most of Noé’s work, it goes on well past the making of the point – but even at its grisliest, it’s hard to take your eyes off it.

One Child Nation: China’s One-Child Policy, a 35-year decree that families were only allowed a single offspring, was pushed by amusing propaganda and reiterated in terrifying, threatening banners. But it wasn’t a simple family planning issue, as this eye-opening first person documentary from directors Nanfu Wang (Hooligan Sparow) and Zhang Lynn. It left a legacy of abduction, human trafficking, forced sterilization and abortion, and on and on; the horror stories and images they capture are hard to hear. But they’re vital and necessary; this is an upsetting film, but a must-see.

ON HULU:

Amazing Grace: Back in January of 1972, an impossibly young Sydney Pollack headed up a crew that filmed, over two nights in a Los Angeles sanctuary, the recording of Aretha Franklin’s gospel album Amazing Grace. It became a bestseller, but the footage was never assembled or released (for “technical reasons,” per the opening credits) – until now. The result is more a concert film than documentary, and that’s just fine, because it’s as pure a shot of sheer joy as you’re likely to feel this season. Franklin is backed up by the Southern California Community Choir under the guidance of Rev. James Cleveland, who is essentially our emcee; early on, he invites us to “relax and enjoy one of the greatest sounds in the world,” which he goes on to pinpoint as “the sound of gospel,” but this viewer assumed he meant the sound of Aretha. Pollack shoots her in tight, beads of sweat rolling down her face – she’s standing still, to be clear, just singing so hard that she works up a sweat. Her singing is raw, and rowdy, and transcendent, and within a few minutes, the film itself is like being in church; when Cleveland suggests, as reverends do, to reach out to neighbor, I realized I was looking around for one. I was lucky enough to see its DOCNYC premiere, where Rev. Al Sharpton led an opening prayer, asking the Lord to “bless this film, that it blesses people all over the world.” Amen.

The Nightingale: Writer/director Jennifer Kent follows up The Babadook with a mercilessly grim revenge tale, set in a world of rapists, brutes, and murderers, and all but dares us to look at its parade of ugly, upsetting images. (Happy holidays!) If this sounds like a warning, it is – this is not a film for those with weak stomachs for violence. But beyond the blood and gore lies catharsis, as well as a visceral examination of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute misery of grief and despair. If this all makes you wonder who The Nightingale is for, well, I’m not sure I know either. But there’s no denying that Kent told the story she wanted to tell, and didn’t compromise. That’s admirable – borderline heroic – and there are scenes here that burn with the kind of righteous anger you can’t achieve by playing softball.

Little Woods: Writer/director DaCosta helms this whisper-quiet but deeply affecting story of opioid dealing in the backwoods of North Dakota, anchored by an achingly good Tessa Thompson performance. She stars as Ollie, a broke young woman on parole for dealing oxy on job sites and truck stops, who reluctantly reenters the life in a family emergency. (Look at that, it’s a movie about “economic anxiety.”) Thompson conveys vulnerability, desperation, and toughness with aplomb; it’s full of scenes other actors would’ve oversold and blown, and she nails every one of them. DaCosta directs in a modest, slice-of-life style, which only heightens the tension of events on screen — this is the kind of movie you lean forward to hear, and before you know it, you’re overwhelmed.

ON CRACKLE:

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: The title card that opens Gillian’s riff on Cervantes’s classic is, if anything (and for once), understated: “And now… after 25 years in the making… and unmaking…” Quixote was, for all those years, the movie that Gilliam could not get in the can; an earlier attempt was documented in the train-wreck autopsy Lost in La Mancha, and the closing titles dedicate the film to not one, but two deceased actors who were slated to play its lead. All that off-screen drama could easily overshadow what finally made it to the screen, but the final product is, surprisingly enough, a light and lithe bit of interpretation and autobiography (ultimately, and appropriately, it’s about how the story of Don Quixote can drive men to madness). The central premise is juicy: a slick commercial director (Adam Driver) is shooting an ad in Spain when he encounters the aged man (Jonathan Pryce) who played Quixote for him in a student film many moons ago, and is apparently still lost in the role. It is A Lot, as most Terry Gilliam movies are. But Driver and Pryce are very funny (and serve as appropriate counterpoints), and Gilliam smoothly navigates the tonal turns, venturing into self-aware, melancholy, and very funny territory.

This month marked the 125th anniversary of the birth of essayist, novelist, and all-around with James Thurber. To celebrate the occasion, HarperCollins has published Thurber's Collected Fables (edited by Michael J. Rosen), which combines an unpublished Thurber preface and 85 of his classic fables, with ten previously uncollected stories.

The Aesop-inspired Thurber fables were renowned not only for their absurdist wit and quotable morals, but their astute satires of timeless struggles. And thus, it seems appropriate (considering the kind of year it’s been for the profession) to excerpt this story of the woes of working journalists.

"THE SHEEP IN WOLF'S CLOTHING" BY JAMES THURBER, FROM "COLLECTED FABLES":

Not very long ago there were two sheep who put on wolf’s clothing and went among the wolves as spies, to see what was going on. They arrived on a fete day, when all the wolves were singing in the taverns or dancing in the street. The first sheep said to his companion, “Wolves are just like us, for they gambol and frisk. Every day is fete day in Wolfland.” He made some notes on a piece of paper (which a spy should never do) and he headed them “My Twenty-Four Hours in Wolfland,” for he had decided not to be a spy any longer but to write a book on Wolfland and also some articles for the Sheep’s Home Companion. The other sheep guessed what he was planning to do, so he slipped away and began to write a book called “My Ten Hours in Wolfland.” The first sheep suspected what was up when he found his friend had gone, so he wired a book to his publisher called “My Five Hours in Wolfland,” and it was announced for publication first. The other sheep immediately sold his manuscript to a newspaper syndicate for serialization.

Both sheep gave the same message to their fellows: wolves were just like sheep, for they gambolled and frisked, and every day was fete day in Wolfland. The citizens of Sheepland were convinced by all this, so they drew in their sentinels and they let down their barriers. When the wolves descended on them one night, howling and slavering, the sheep were as easy to kill as flies on a windowpane.

Moral: Don’t get it right, just get it written.

COLLECTED FABLES. Edited by Michael Rosen. Copyright © 2019 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted here with permission of Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers and the Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc.

It's the holiday season and it's crazy cold, so how about warming your heart with some pictures of mama polar bears cuddling and nuzzling their cubs? They come to us (via Bored Panda) from Canadian photographer David Hemmings, who tells us, when quizzed of their origin, "Witnessing Polar Bear mothers with their weeks-old cubs in the wild and photographing them - could there be a better wildlife experience?"

We're not ones to argue. Hemmings's series features bears and cubs from Northern Manitoba, shortly after coming back into the world from hibernation, and their sweet and gorgeous and probably just what you need in this stressful week.

Check out more of Hemmings's work (or sign up for an adventure of your own) on his website, or follow him on Facebook.

Check out more of David Hemmings's work on his website, or follow him on Facebook.

This time last year, we were telling you all about the exploits of former social media manager Jason Ginsburg, who turned his successful @FakeThemePark Twitter account into a book. Well, now there's a sequel, and we're here to share a bit of that one with you too.

You Must Be This Tall to Exit the Park (out now), like its predecessor and the Twitter feed that inspired it, concerns “a fictional, unnamed park that combines all the best — and all the very worst — of Disneyland, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, and Six Flags,” according to Ginsburg, who spent nearly a decade doing research at Universal Studios Hollywood, where he served as a VIP tour guide, show host, PA announcer, and character performer. Combining material from social media with new bits and bonuses, You Must Be This Tall is available in Kindle and paperback formats. We're pleased to present this excerpt.

FROM "YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO EXIT THE PARK":

Apology Letter to an Upset Guest: We’re Sorry It’s Your Fault

Dear [redacted, but probably someone you know],

Thank you for visiting the park this past week. We know you and your family came a long way from wherever. We’d like to address all your experiences during your visit.

First, our apologies for the confusion at the Ticket Booth. When you presented your Pepsi can for a discount, our Cast Member should have scanned the code for $10 off general admission, instead of trying to drink it, saying “What, none left for me?,” crushing the can on his head, and throwing it at your cousin. Please note that the offending Cast Member has been moved to management.

While the safety warnings at Dragon Dive state that “You will get wet,” you should not have been completely thrown from the ride vehicle and submerged in ice-cold, high-salinity water for either six seconds (our estimate) or 85 seconds (yours). We’re sorry that your safety restraint was not properly fastened, which the Ride Operator would have noticed had she not been hosting a live Snapchat event to promote her line of Native American-inspired bracelets. As a refund, we’ve included one of the bracelets.

We’re happy to inform you that the raccoon who, as Security put it, “got all up in your business,” has been removed from the park. However, it will likely return. And it will remember.

All volunteers for Jimmy Jaguar’s Jubilee Jig are asked to dance with Jimmy as part of the show. We’re not certain why Jimmy chose to dance with you for the entire performance and 20 minutes after, or why he played “Sometimes When We Touch” on a loop. The Jimmy Jaguar character performer will be asked to review park policies, but this will be largely symbolic as he can barely read.

We’re sorry Princess Snowflake made you feel inferior and will ask her to tone down her superiority. After your unfortunate experience, a sign will be placed by the southern tables outside Burger Barn that clearly says “Caution: Wasps.” The ghost you encountered in the Haunted Manor was apparently not a Cast Member in costume but an actual malevolent spirit, either a demon from Gehenna or the ghost of a deranged murderer from the 19th century. We apologize for the massive terror that threatened to shatter your reality and drive you hopelessly insane.

Again, our deepest apologies. Though your day sounds disappointing in the aggregate, we’d like to note that you rode Chaos Coaster without incident, due to its malfunctioning speed of 3 miles per hour. You also mentioned that you enjoyed Avalanche Adventure, though you bumped your head during the final drop and lost all memory of the ride. You also claimed to enjoy the cotton candy you consumed during your visit, though that may change when the CDC report is released.

Thank you for visiting the happiest park in the world. We will welcome you warmly on your return (see below for blackout dates; warm welcome is not guaranteed).

Sincerely,

Guest Relations

Excerpted from "You Must Be This Tall to Exit The Park" by Jason Ginsburg, out now from lulu.com. Used by permission.

Unsurprisingly, since the customary Tuesday release day falls on Christmas Eve this year, there’s not much on the new release shelf; if you’re buying something, they figure, you’ve already bought it. So instead, let’s seize upon the season, and check out where our yearly holiday favorites are streaming this year – and throw in one new streaming release that’s worth your vacation time.

ON NETFLIX:

The Two Popes: Netflix’s final big prestige play of the season features two giants of contemporary acting, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, as (respectively) conservative Pope Benedict and liberal future Pope Francis. Anthony McCarten’s screenplay uses their colliding ascensions to the position as the framework for a vibrant, thoughtful debate on the place and future of the church, while director Fernando Meirelles adroitly balances the heaviness of material with a lightness of tone (most of the good gags serve to remind us that, Pope or not, these men are flesh and bone). Hopkins is wonderful as ever (“The trouble he gets into,” he chuckles, while unwinding with his favorite canine crime show), but Pryce is a revelation, summoning the simultaneous impulses of duty, desire, hesitancy, and regret.

A Very Murray Christmas: Director Sofia Coppola and her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray re-teamed for this one-of-a-kind riff on the old holiday variety specials, in which Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra or whoever would gather a cast of their famous friends, sing a few carols, do a couple of sketches, and call it a night. Murray and Coppola’ s riff is, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated than that, sending up the conventions of such phony showbiz affairs while indulging in bit of seasonal melancholy (and, yes, cheer).

White Christmas: But if you’re gonna watch a Christmas movie, y’know, watch a Christmas movie. This 1954 musical comedy romance from director Michael Curtiz (who also helmed a pretty good little movie called Casablanca) jumps off of the title tune, which star Bing Crosby first sang in Holiday Inn, to tell the story of two Army-buddy entertainers doing a Christmas week gig at their old commanding officer’s resort, and falling in love, and getting into trouble, etc. Look, nobody watches White Christmas for the plot; queue it up for Crosby and Kaye’s chemistry, the unforgettable “Sisters” number by Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, and the general good vibes.

The Long Kiss Goodnight: Action writer/director Shane Black has a bit of a calling card: he loves setting his movies during the Christmas season, going back to his first big hit, Lethal Weapon. This 1996 amnesia action thriller starring Geena Davis (then the wife of director Renny Harlin) and Samuel L. Jackson is, true to form, chock full of Yuletide, with little touches like a Christmas light-ed action scene and a holiday parade that leads directly to Davis accidently blowing her cover.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

It’s a Wonderful Life : No holiday season is complete without revisiting Frank Capra’s 1947 classic — albeit one that doesn’t even mention the holiday until somewhere near the 100-minute mark. And maybe that’s part of its appeal; it’s not just a feature-length sleigh-bell ring, but an emotionally complicated chronicle of life, family, and sacrifice. And thus, it manages to grow with the passing years, as the viewer’s own experiences render those of its protagonists even more resonant. (Plus, one never gets tired of giggling at its FBI file.)

Bad Santa: A rude, crude, uproarious bit of bitter-tasting holiday backwash from director Terry Zwigoff. Billy Bob Thornton stars as Willie T. Stoke (a decidedly W.C. Fieldsian name for the kind of role Fields could have played, had he been born 60 years later), a horny, unshaven, unshowered, piss-drunk (and piss-pantsed) department store Santa, and Thornton plays him as if perpetually in the clutches of a particularly wicked hangover. John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s script almost seems designed to offend, with scenes of a hammered Santa beating the shit out of papier-mâché animals, urinating on himself in the Santa chair, and sodomizing a clerk in the dressing room. Acid-tongued and wickedly funny, Bad Santa has rightfully become an anti-holiday classic.

ON DISNEY+:

Iron Man 3: After The Long Kiss Goodnight, Black went on a long hiatus before roaring back with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, unsurprisingly set during the Christmas season (and featuring Michelle Monaghan as Santa’s sexiest helper). When that movie helped put Robert Downey Jr. back on the map, and Downey repaid the favor by suggesting Black write and direct the third Iron Man movie, his enthusiasts chuckled that he was finally doing a movie he couldn’t set at Christmas. Joke was on us; Iron Man 3 is indeed another Christmas flick, with a dispute over holiday gifts providing a fine running joke for Tony and Pepper’s relationship.

The Nightmare Before Christmas: This 1993 stop-action family horror/comedy is too often listed as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a proprietary credit handing altogether too much authorship to Burton — he’s credited as producer and story writer, but the picture is undeniably the work of director Henry Selick, who would go on to make James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. Here, he concocts a cheerfully dark and endlessly hummable hybrid of Halloween and Christmas movie, and one that plays equally well at either end of the holiday season.

ON HULU:

Saint: Dick Maas’s Dutch horror/comedy (also known as Sint) opens with St. Nicholas and his goons on horseback, terrorizing a village which then raises their pitchforks and burns him alive. So yeah, right away, not your average Christmas movie. Maas carries off his tale of a murderous Santa with much greater success than his American counterparts because his film (unlike the Silent Nights) has got a forceful and wicked sense of humor; the filmmaker has clearly ingested copious amounts of American horror movies, and regurgitates them with a wink and nudge. It’s not the most festive movie, but it’s a lot of fun.

ON HBO GO/HBO NOW:

The Ref: “You know what I’m going to get you next Christmas, Mom? A big wooden cross, so that every time you feel unappreciated for your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it.” Not many Christmas-themed movies would trot out dialogue like that, but not many Christmas-themed movies are as audacious as Ted Demme’s terrific 1994 comedy. Released by Touchstone in March of that year (nice scheduling!), the film was promoted primarily as a vehicle for Denis Leary and his angry-smoker persona. The few who saw it in that initial run were surprised to discover a smart, well-written (by Fisher Kingscribe Richard LaGravenese), insightful look at a dysfunctional family and a crumbling marriage — a kind of Christmas with George and Martha.

The Ice Harvest: Billy Bob Thornton, the patron saint of anti-Christmas movies, returns to our list with this 2005 caper film, which includes such tidings of comfort and joy as “Only morons are nice on Christmas” and “Christmas Eve. Ho ho fucking ho!” It’s the tale of a lawyer (John Cusack) and a businessman (Thornton) who team to rip off a mob boss on Christmas Eve; double-crosses, dead bodies, and holiday drinking ensue. Though promoted as a comedy (which you’d expect from its director, Groundhog Day’s Harold Ramis), The Ice Harvest has a surprisingly dark, almost noir streak to it, and has very little time in its tight 92 minutes for holiday pleasantries.

ON DIRECTV:

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: Comedy franchises seldom peak in their third installment, but that’s exactly what happened in 1989, when the Griswold family (contrary to the title) stayed home for the holidays for funniest film in the series. The comic set pieces are priceless, the supporting cast is aces (including the very young Johnny Galecki and Juliette Lewis), and Chevy Chase is at the top of his game — particularly in his immortal “Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?” rant.

Trading Places: Not a Christmas movie per se, but with one very memorable Christmas sequence: Dan Aykroyd’s fallen businessman, who could give Bad Santa’s Willie Stokes a run for his money in both the drunkenness and body odor department, dons a Santa suit to sneak into his former employer’s Christmas party and plant drugs in the desk of his replacement. It goes, well, poorly, but Aykroyd does manage to make it out of the bash with a full side of salmon, which he then consumes on a city bus. Happy holidays!

Everybody loves a good foreword - you know, those bite-sized introductory essays, in which an expert or admirer or maybe even just some random celebrity tells you all about their very personal connection with the book you're about to read. Entertainment writer Jon Chattman loves forewords so much, he put together an entire book of them, and since the foreword is the best part of the book anyway, he figured that's enough.

Moving Foreword: Real Introductions to Totally Made Up Books (out now from BenBella Books) features celebrities, comedians, musicians, and other writers sharing their thoughts on topics ranging from how to have fun at funerals to Chewbacca's prowess as a lover. In this excerpt, singer-songwriter and musician Inara George - one half of the Bird and the Bee (a collaboration with Grammy-winning producer, singer, and instrumentalist Greg Kurstin) and a member of the Living Sisters - pens an intro to a fascinating exploration of fairy tale princesses and... well, you'll see.

FROM "MOVING FOREWORD: REAL INTRODUCTIONS TO TOTALLY MADE UP BOOKS":

When I was a girl I used to practice kissing by draping a wet washcloth over the side of the bathtub, and then kiss the rim of the tub where I had laid the cloth. I have no idea why I thought that this technique would help give me a leg up in the kissing department. It was just something wet and I guess I figured that would have to do. I mean, how do any of us figure out this stuff? I suppose it’s a lot of trial and error. But who are our role models and teachers? Our parents? Are we all doomed to unconsciously recreate the relationships we grew up around? My father died when I was five, and my mother never remarried. Maybe that’s why I didn’t kiss a boy until I was sixteen. I just didn’t know how it was done. It scared the shit out of me, and he didn’t understand why I kept saying I needed a damp cloth.

Our friends certainly affect our romantic styles. We schemed and strategized to get the coolest, most unavailable guys, even if someone wonderful but dorky was into us. Oh, Kevin Scott. He was the sweetest guy in the world and not even bad looking. He drove a winding road all the way up to my house just to take me on a date, but I dropped him the second a friend asked if I liked “that nerd.” I said no, and never spoke to Kevin again. You can go ahead and judge me, but I’m already remorseful, so what will that help? My whole point is I didn’t know what I was doing back then. If anything, I’m the one that missed out. Is it weird that I’m still sad about this?

Anyway, I don’t want to get off track. I didn’t know how to do romance, and I didn’t know anything about sex, either. Who is really telling us what we need to know before we get tangled up in that? Sex is great. I love sex! Two thumbs up! But why didn’t anyone give me a real nuts-and-bolts rundown? (Sex education in school is hardly sufficient, but that’s a whole other subject.) My friends didn’t know what they were talking about, and I really wasn’t prepared to hear about it from my mother.

Now that I’m a mother myself, I realize I had a teacher after all, one I didn’t notice was affecting me as I made my way through the minefield of sex and love: princesses! Oh dear God, princesses, fairy tales, and their insidious little messages. And these stories have lodged in our collective minds for centuries. They are beautiful tales, yes, but they got problems! There’s Ariel, who gives up her voice just to get on a boat with Eric. Sleeping Beauty finds her greatest love while she’s unconscious. Belle’s like, “I love reading—oh, and being seduced by a literal monster!” Snow White spends her days doing chores for seven grumbling little dudes. I mean, no wonder I dumped Kevin, amirite?

But there’s an even subtler thing that unites those dreamy princesses. They meet a man, fall in love with him almost instantaneously, and then get married about a week or so later. We never learn how they dealt with the guys’ issues, or learned to talk about feelings, or figured out how to put what part where (can you imagine learning about it from a talking teapot?).

At long last, Aurora Charming has provided an antidote for what ails these stories. The Birds and the Bees: When Prince Charming Found Cinderella’s Clitoris, Not Her Slipper is funny, fascinating, and should be required reading for all young women and men on the cusp of

their romantic journeys. Charming tells the other half of those age-old stories, and in the process, she’s rewritten these tales into ones that we can relate to. The Prince’s discovery of Cinderella’s clitoris was so poignant it brought tears to my eyes. Ariel’s intrepid search for her larynx filled me with pride and confidence. And that’s just the first two chapters! As a princess herself, Aurora has a unique perspective and deep connections with these ladies, and she takes readers through just what happened after the wedding ended and the credits rolled.

While our culture swings back and forth on its pendulum from conservative to progressive and back again, Charming slices through all the nonsense with simple, useful information, arming her readers with enough knowledge to respect themselves and the ones they love. I was touched and flattered when she reached out to me to ask if I’d be the first to read The Birds and the Bees, having been inspired by my song “Would You Be My Fucking Boyfriend.” I so wish I had this book during my teenage years! I feel lucky knowing my daughter will have it during hers.

"Foreword to Aurora Charming’s 'The Birds and the Bees: When Prince Charming Discovered Cinderella’s Clitoris, Not Her Slipper'" by Inara George. From "Moving Foreword: Real Introductions to Totally Made Up Books," edited by Jon Chattman, out now from BenBella Books. Used by permission.

Bombshell, Jay Roach’s dramatization of the fall of Fox News head Roger Ailes, went into wide release last weekend, propelled by a good early showing (at least for its actors) in the year-end awards: two Golden Globe nominations (Charlize Theron for Best Actress, Margot Robbie for Best Supporting Actress), four SAG nominations (for Theron, Robbie, Nicole Kidman, and Ensemble – and to put that into perspective, that’s a nomination that the acclaimed Marriage Story couldn’t net), four from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and more from several regional critics groups.

It’s all sort of astonishing, because Bombshell is an absolute toilet fire of a movie, a sub-HBO-movie effort that uses winking storytelling tricks (many familiar from screenwriter Charles Randolph’s earlier The Big Short), SNL-level celebrity impersonation, and kiddie pool-deep interrogation of the figures at its center to simplistically reduce a story of internalized misogyny, institutional corruption, and white feminism into a “Yas, kween” conflict of good guys and bad guys, when even its protagonists were, at best, heavy grey.

There’s much to say about the failures of the film in general – I’d direct you to Alison Wilmore at Vulture and Alissa Wilkinson at Vox for more on that – but one scene in particular is worth addressing, and wrestling with, because it so cleanly summarizes what’s wrong with Bombshell, and why the people making it had no business doing so.

The scene in question comes around the 37-minute mark. We’ve spent the first act getting to know the world of Fox News through the eyes and experiences of three key women: superstar nighttime anchor Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), on-the-decline Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and producer Kayla (Margot Robbie), a fictional composite character (and “influencer in the Jesus space”) who’s trying to work her way up the Fox ladder. The ambitious and nervous Kayla has talked her way into a private meeting with Ailes (a jowled-up John Lithgow), who chats with her about social conservatism, the FNC ethos, and her future there. “I think I’d be freakin’ phenomenal on your network,” she insists.

“Stand up and give me a twirl,” he suggests. She does. “Now uh… pull your dress up, and let me see your legs,” he commands, from the seat in front of her. After a moment’s hesitation, she pulls her minidress up a bit, trying to laugh it off.

“It’s a visual medium, Kayla,” he barks. “C’mon.” And so she lifts it up more. “Higher,” he grunts.

Director Roach cuts to a close-up of Kayla’s face, registering discomfort – and then, slowly pans away from her face and down her body as she raises her hemline. Roach pans back up to her face, then cuts to a close-up of Ailes again grunting “Higher,” then cuts back to Kayla’s face, looking around in panic. Then Roach cuts to a medium shot of her backside, from behind, as she pulls the dress higher, while Ailes gawks in the background. And then he cuts to a close-up, from Ailes’s POV, of her front, as she hikes the skirt up higher to reveal a peek of her panties. Only then, after a cutaway reaction shot of Ailes, does the camera go back to her humiliated face.

The sequence is repugnant – not just for what’s happening onscreen (which was surely intended), but for the way it’s photographed, and what those choices convey. It’s Roach tsk-tsk-ing the monstrosity of Roger Ailes and the harassment he subjected his female subordinates too, while at the same time taking the opportunity, via invasive close-ups and Playboy Video Centerfold-style camerawork, to leer at Margot Robbie. It’s a director having his cake and eating it too.

What’s worse, he’s inviting us to enjoy Ailes’s view. By framing the peekaboo shot from Lithgow’s perspective, and by bracketing it on either side with images of the character looking and reacting, Roach is using the grammar of cinema to force the viewer into the scene as harasser – to see what he sees, and potentially to enjoy it. Roach would rather we see this scene through the eyes of the perpetrator than those of the victim; he’d rather create a semblance of his experience than hers.

In interviews about the scene, Roach has said, “I’ve never filmed anything as excruciating,” while screenwriter Randolph explained, “It had to be dark enough that we could put men who normally would not have these experiences inside Kayla’s heart and head, so they could experience it with her.” If that was the aim, the result is a miserable failure, constantly returning us to Ailes’s heart and head instead. To Roach, the scene “was about taking something from her, taking her dignity… I just wanted to make sure the emotional levels were there and that the empathy you would feel for this is just devastating.” All of that is certainly possible when you have an actress of Margot Robbie’s skill at your disposal. But for every second that the camera is lingering on her thighs, her ass, and her underwear, it’s not on her face and her eyes. That’s where the emotion is happening. That’s where the devastation is registering.

It would be hard to summon up a more poignant distillation of the concerns voiced, by more than one observer, when this project was announced as the work of a male screenwriter and a male director. Was there really not a single female filmmaker or writer that Bombshell’s producers could have found to tell this story? Those producers, notably, include Theron, who responded to those concerns thusly in the New York Times: “When you find the right man to tell that story, there’s real value in that.” (Asked about this scene directly, Theron replied, “My concern was making sure she was comfortable in the underwear she was wearing.”)

Roach and Randolph have done a fair amount of damage control themselves; the writer insists they “let Charlize and other female producers lead the way,” while Roach claims, “Charlize’s collaboration and power in the overall hierarchy was imperative. It was just so clear this was going to be a team effort.” And maybe that’s true. But the minidress scene makes it clear that if there was, to borrow Theron’s phrasing, a “right man” to tell this story, it certainly wasn’t one this concerned with capturing and immortalizing, in the film’s most pivotal moments, such an explicitly male gaze.

Catalan photographer Xavi Bou was always fascinated by birds - and figured out a unique way to photograph their flight patterns. "One day I asked myself what kind of trail the birds would leave in the sky if that were possible," he told My Modern Met. "It was then that I imagined the lines they would create and so I began to investigate how to make them visible." The resulting series, which he calls "Ornitographies," is a combination of photography and motion study, capturing the shapes generated by migratory flight patterns, and creating something uniquely beautiful in the process.

These are some of our favorite pictures from the series; to see more, visit his website, or follow him on Instagram.

To see more of Xavi Bou's work, visit his website, or follow him on Instagram.

I’ve been making this list for this site for eight years now (look it up!) and I can’t recall it ever being harder to make – or easier. It was harder in the sense that 2019 was an incredibly strong year for new movies, especially for a soft touch like me, and I could’ve easily penned a list with twice as many films I unreservedly recommend. But it was easier because the top five slid into place with nary a second thought; no matter the high quality of so much of this year’s work, these films were (to these eyes) clearly the best of the best. You may disagree! But these are the films I’ve been unable to get out of my head:

25. “Hustlers”

Some of the most potent of political cinema smuggles its messaging in, dazzling us with flash and style and energy (and, yes, J-Lo quaking to “Criminal”) and then jabbing the knife when we least expect it. Writer/director Lorene Scafaria takes this to its extreme, knocking us out with skin and neon and cash and platinum, and delivering the punch with perhaps the best closing line of the year: “This city, this whole country, is a strip club. You've got people tossing the money… and people doing the dance.” (Now available on demand.)

24. “The Farewell”

No institution provides more (or richer) fodder for the contemporary filmmaker than the woes of family. Writer/director Lulu Wang’s friskily funny and enchantingly melancholy comedy/drama dramatized the offhand intimacy and casual deceptions of the modern family with grace and wit, with the added bonus of handing Awkwafina the kind of “surprising depth” role most comic actors have to wait a good decade for. (Now available on demand.)

23. “Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins”

The proud Texan and political commentator has been gone for a dozen years now, and the mind boggles at what could’ve been – at what the fiercest and funniest critic of the Bush boys and other Republican snake oil salesman would’ve made of the current administration. Thankfully, director Janice Engel helps us imagine; in addition to the (very good) straight-forward bio-doc elements of her film, Engel finds quotes and snippets from Ivins’s work that match up with contemporary images a bit too easily. Those moments remind us of the incisiveness of her wit, and of her proper place as a timeless commentator of the Will Rogers and Mark Twain school. (Now available on demand.)

22. “Luce”

The films that matter these days, the ones that rise above the din of explosions and roaring engines, are those willing to have uncomfortable conversations – about who we are, how we act, and how we got there. Director Julius Onah and screenwriter J C Lee (adapting his play) aren’t afraid of those conversations; in fact, they revel in them, and this is one of the more anxiety-inducing motion pictures in a year loaded with them. And between this and “Waves,” it’s becoming very clear that Kelvin Harrison Jr. is a rare talent indeed. (Now available on demand.)

21. “Diane”

Mary Kay Place is one of those character actors who’s been doing work so good, for so long, that it’s easy to take her for granted. Writer/director Kent Jones ensured we won’t anymore with this penetrating character study, providing Place with a rare leading role as a nice retired lady whose story is a bit more complicated than it seems. (Now streaming on Hulu.)

20. “The Souvenir”

Toxic relationships get a fair amount of discussion and dramatization in our culture, but it’s rare to see one brought to life with as much richness and depth as writer/director Joanna Hogg does here. It helps, of course, to have two actors this superb; Honor Swinton Byrne conveys the combination of neurosis and intelligence that would lead a woman like this to the point she's at, while Tom Burke puts across, in scene after scene, both why she would stay with him, and why she shouldn’t. (Now streaming on Amazon Prime.)

19. “Burning Cane”

It’s the origin story of the year: writer/director Phillip Youmans was all of 17 years old when he began work on this moody, bluesy story of sin and redemption in the contemporary south; at 19, it won multiple awards at the Tribeca Film Festival and a distribution deal with Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY. That someone that young could even make a professional feature is impressive; that it would be this haunting, this vivid, and this alive is a miracle. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

18. “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”

Co-writer/director Joe Talbot made no less an impressive debut with this sprawling, elegiac, and absurdly funny story of gentrification, historical revisionism, and makeshift family in the Bay Area (quickly becoming a hotspot for innovative, provocative filmmaking). Talbot’s eye is distinctive – it’s a film of gorgeous compositions and memorable juxtapositions – but he’s a storyteller first, and the tenderness and quirkiness of the relationship at the film’s center (between Jonathon Majors and co-writer Jimmie Fails) is both charming and complex. (Now streaming on Amazon Prime.)

17. “High Flying Bird”

Only Steven Soderbergh would go off and make a sports movie with no sports in it, but that’s what he does here, and brilliantly. “Moonlight” scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney set his fast, smart screenplay during an NBA lockout, stripping that league (and pro sports in general) to its basics: a business that deals in the value and commodification of human beings. The result is an entertaining and thought-provoking shot across the bow of capitalism, with yet another movie-star turn by the great André Holland. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

16. “Little Women”

I’ll own it: I was initially a little bummed to hear that Greta Gerwig was following up the triumph of Lady Bird with yet another film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic. Hadn’t we seen that enough? It turned out, we hadn’t seen one quite like this – playful, noisy, rowdy, and sharp-edged, as much a work of literary criticism as literary adaptation. It does what the very best of all film retoolings do: it merges the sensibility of the original work and the filmmaker, blurring them to a point where each one's influence on the work is indistinct from the other. (Opens in theaters Christmas Day.)

15. “Knives Out”

Few films this year were as flat-out, straight-up entertaining – fast, fleet, funny, and unpredictable – as Rian Johnson’s manor house murder mystery, which takes the dusty conventions of such frivolities and turns them inside out. He makes fine use of one of the year’s best casts, but special praise is warranted for Ana de Armas’s star-making turn as the surprise heroine, and Daniel Craig doing the best fake Southern accent since, well, Daniel Craig in Logan Lucky. (Now playing in theaters.)

14. “Mike Wallace is Here”

Part of making a list like this is owning your soft spots, so let’s just put this out there: there are few things on this earth admire more than a present-tense documentary, the somewhat-in-vogue-lately subset of nonfiction filmmaking that tosses away two of the biggest crutches of the form – voice-of-God narration and present-day talking-head interviews – to tell its story purely through archival footage. Avi Belkin’s bio-doc is the first of two such films on this list, detailing the career of television’s eminent newsman solely through interviews (both those he sat for and those he conducted) and various ephemera (pre-rolls, outtakes, etc.) It doesn’t sound like it should work. It works magnificently, a classic case of medium merging with message, showing us both the man Wallace wanted to present to the world, and the more complicated figure underneath. (Now streaming on Hulu.)

13. “Honey Boy”

Alma Har’el has been one to watch for a while now, an innovative filmmaker playing at the crossroads of narrative and documentary. She was thus a smart choice for longtime booster Shia LaBeouf’s therapeutic screenplay, based on his years as a child actor, his damaging relationship with his father, and his struggles as a young adult. Har’el keeps the material from creeping into the realms of treacle and self-indulgence, even with LaBeouf risking both by playing the part of his own father. It’s a chilling performance – and a powerful, moving picture. (Now playing in theaters.)

12. “The Report”

Scott Z. Burns’s screenplays for Steven Soderbergh (including Contagion and The Informant!) were the kind of sharp, intelligent, quietly furious acts of protest that are increasingly rare in mainstream entertainment. His directorial debut is in the same vein, detailing analyst Daniel J. Jones’s work on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the CIA Detention and Torture Program, and the attempts by those it indicted to bury it. A first-rate investigative thriller, with an even trickier piece of acting by Adam Driver than Marriage Story, in which we watch this patient, methodical man's slow fuse turn into a live wire. (Now streaming on Amazon Prime.)

11. “Ad Astra”

Writer/director James Gray (whose The Immigrant has been suspiciously missing from all those best-of-the-decade lists) makes a star-driven sci-fi movie, but you can’t take the art out of the art filmmaker, and thank God for that. He turns Brad Pitt’s mission into deepest space into a personal journey, as a man comes face to face with the father who abandoned him, but left his most unfortunate remnants in his son’s soul. It’s both dazzling and elusive, and Pitt’s reading of three simple words (“I know, Dad”) may be the single most heartbreaking moment of cinema this year. (Now available on demand.)

10. “Her Smell”

By turns raw and exhausting, ebullient and maddening, lyrical and roughhouse, Alex Ross Perry’s five-act surgical examination of an impossible genius is a film of nerve-jangling energy and emotional nudity. Elisabeth Moss has never been better (and that’s certainly saying something); Ross’s messy style has never been more effective. I’d have never guessed a Bryan Adams song would move me to tears, which may tell you everything you need to know about the power Perry and Moss are wielding here. (Now available on demand.)

9. “Parasite”

Bong Joon-ho brings his class warfare sensibility to the con artist comedy, and comes up with one of his spikiest works to date. His sense of film rhythm is peerless, Hitchockian really; he juggles his varying tones and threads with such grace and ease, it’s easy to be lulled into complacency. And then he clobbers you. The clobbering of Parasite’s climax is the kind of organized chaos that would wobble most filmmakers – yet Bong barely breaks a sweat, bringing this one home with vividness and verve. (Now playing in theaters.)

8. “Fast Color”

The year’s only great superhero movie was probably the only one you didn’t hear about, and that’s a shame. It may not be a superhero movie at all; this story of three generations of women reuniting and harnessing their telekinetic abilities in a vaguely post-apocalyptic American Southwest is a character-driven indie drama first and a tale of heroism (and special effects) second, and a distant second at that. It’s disarmingly emotional and endlessly absorbing, and that’s more than I can say for any of the Marvel movies we all sat through this year. (Now streaming on Hulu.)

7. “Uncut Gems”

Everything is just a lot to deal with these days, and there may no film that better captured the relentless too-much-idness of it all than the Safdie Brothers’ glorious throwback to the scuzzy New York movies of yore. Adam Sandler is a revelation as a diamond dealer with a gambling/cheating/general responsibility problem, and the Safdies surround him with a motley crew of weirdos, first-timers, and character actors. It’s a smashing movie, intoxicating and eccentric - a culmination of everything these filmmakers have done so far, and a promise of how much more they’re capable of. (Now playing in theaters.)

6. “Pain and Glory”

A towering, lyrical work of sublime pleasure from Pedro Almodóvar, and one of his most personal – concerning, as it does, a filmmaker in what is usually and politely dubbed the “late period.” The Almodóvar avatar is here played by his longtime star Antonio Banderas, in what is easily the year’s finest performance; the things Banderas is doing, in his eyes and on his face, as he watches his long-lost love walk away from his door are simply staggering. And Almodóvar is a director who knows he can hold on that face for as long as he likes. This is the work of two master artists, both working at the absolute height of their powers. (Now playing in theaters.)

5. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”

Quentin Tarantino says he’s only directing one more movie, and maybe he’s right (though let’s not forget Steven Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking back in 2013). If so, it’s sort of surprising this is his penultimate picture rather than his swan song, so steeped is it in affection for Hollywood – both as a concept and a geographic location. And that affection is undeniable; it’s right there on the screen in the attention paid to details of production design, costuming, history, and paraphernalia. He and his team build a living, breathing world for these characters to dwell and work and joke and screw around in, and while he’s made better films than this one, I’m not sure he’s made one so endlessly rewatchable. You just want to hang out with these people, in this town, at this time, and when it’s over, you want to hang out with them some more. (Now available on demand.)

4. “Apollo 11”

The second present tense documentary on this list, the best documentary of the year, and some of the finest editing this year in any film, of any kind. It’s not just that it takes such technical precision and mastery of technique to make one of the most-told tales of modern history seem fresh and exciting; it’s that Apollo 11 is so well done, so sharply cut and masterfully scored, that there are sequences where the filmmakers build suspense out of situations whose outcomes are why we’re watching the movie in the first place. It’s an astonishing feat of filmmaking prowess, and a blast to watch on top of that. (Now streaming on Hulu.)

3. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”

Céline Sciamma’s period drama is one of the most intensely erotic films in recent memory, but not because it’s graphic or explicit. In fact, quite the contrary. Its eroticism comes from how its protagonists circle each other, for the better part of an hour –how they relate in the aftermath of their initial encounters encounters, and the operatic emotions that erupt from the story’s quiet beginnings. Sciamma doesn’t even use a score, so it’s a movie so quiet you can hear these characters breathe, and, more significantly, hear when those breaths get heavy. This is not a film about sex, but something much rarer and sexier: it’s a film about intimacy, and longing, and letting go. (Back in theaters February 14.)

2. “Marriage Story”

Noah Baumbach’s most emotionally open picture to date, and his best, clearly inspired by his own separation from Jennifer Jason Leigh and thus pulsing with the pain and bleak comedy of lived experience. In taking his specific experience and addressing it so honestly, Baumbach has performed a tiny miracle: he’s made the confessional universal. It’s a wonderful movie, loaded with moments of tiny truth and emotional devastation, and this is probably the best work we’ve seen yet from Johansson and Driver. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

1. “The Irishman”

Some of the year’s best films found our most acclaimed filmmakers making, essentially, closing arguments – summaries of ongoing concerns and thematic motifs, tempered by an acute awareness of their own looming mortality. Almodóvar gave us Pain and Glory, Tarantino gave us Once Upon a Time, but none felt more like a director writing his own obituary (or, to use a scene from the work itself, picking out his own coffin) than Martin Scorsese’s elegiac death rattle, which came billed as a years-in-the-making gangster super-movie and turned out to be something closer to a Eugene O’Neill chamber piece. Robert De Niro is terrific as a mob enforcer whose lifetime of casual crimes and unapologetic tough stuff lead him to a job he does not want, a trigger he cannot pull, but must. Al Pacino is ferocious and funny as Jimmy Hoffa, chewing up these big speeches but turning into a big pussycat around the people he cares about, perhaps to his detriment. And Joe Pesci is stunning as a boss of quiet power, a man who never raises his voice – in other words, the kind of character we’ve rarely seen him play. Scorsese is, simply, a modern master, and this is one of his finest works. (Now streaming on Netflix.)

It's easy to feel hopeless. We're knee-deep in a backslide into fascism and lawlessness, and structural change seems all but impossible. But in historical moments like this, as they say, you can't know your future if you don't know your past - and a bit of inspiration from forces of change certainly wouldn't hurt.

Into that void steps the new book Activist: Portraits of Courage, in which author KK Ottesen seeks out the knowledge of 40 iconic American activists, including Alicia Garza, Bill McKibben, Cecile Richards, Gabrielle Giffords, Marian Wright Edelman, Phyllis Lyon, Angela Davis, Shepard Fairey, and Edward Snowden. Illustrated with remarkable new photographs, and full of pearls of wisdom and advice, Activist is a work of much-needed guidance and hope.

We're pleased to present this excerpt, featuring an interview with Tarana Burke.

FROM "ACTIVIST: PORTRAITS OF COURAGE":

Civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded what would become the #MeToo movement in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women of color from low-wealth communities. Burke was named "Time" Person of the Year 2017, with a group of activists dubbed “the silence breakers.”

I come from a really conscious family. My mother had been part of the Black Power movement in the ’70s, so I was raised with a lot of consciousness. I knew my history, and I knew the things around me that were unjust. But I didn’t have an entry point to do something about it. Then I joined an organization when I was fourteen called the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. The crux of 21st Century was letting young people know, you’re a leader—now. There’s no waiting period. It was a huge mind shift for me. Like, I don’t have to just read about this and be angry about it and debate it in class and stuff. We can go and do something. We can go organize the marches and rallies. We can do that stuff ourselves. And so we did. I never thought about being fourteen or fifteen. It just literally never occurred to me. Nothing about the organization, nothing about how we were trained, focused on our age. The model was essentially: Do the work. Learn by doing.

This is ’88, ’89, and New York is exploding with racial issues. It’s just one thing after another after another. Yusef Hawkins was killed. The Central Park jogger case was the next year. We had just come back from a nine-day camp, and a girl in our program had been dating Yusef Salaam, one of the guys who was accused. She was just, “That’s not Yusef, they didn’t rape anybody.” We were upset about their portrayal in the media—and not just about them, but also, like, it could be any one of us. And I remember saying, We should have a press conference to tell these people that there are positive black youth, and they cannot criminalize black youth. And I remember standing outside, and we made our speeches. We were high-fiving afterwards. It was a big deal for us, it was so powerful, like, Oh, our voices matter.

For a lot of people, it feels like we went from the civil rights movement to Trayvon Martin. Right? The work that we did in the ’80s and ’90s is not well-documented. They don’t really understand that there were those of us fighting against police brutality for decades. You know, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Eleanor Bumpurs—I mean, there’s case after case after case that we were in the streets about.

There’s no way that I could have been prepared for this #MeToo moment had I not had grounding in this work. No way. Part of the reason why the media shifted away from Alyssa [Milano] early on is because she could talk about her feelings, and her experience, or build on the momentum around Harvey Weinstein, but thinking about a movement, that’s not her work. People were hungry to understand why this was happening. So, it gave me an opportunity to come in and say, Listen, what this hashtag has done is allow you to see the breadth and depth of this issue. And now we need to dig into the issue.

We have never confronted sexual violence in this way in this country. We’ve never taken a step back to listen, to really understand the effects of sexual violence, from sexual harassment to rape and murder. We’ve missed opportunities, from Recy Taylor to Anita Hill. And so, you’re dealing with millions of women, mostly, who have been shamed into silence forever. That’s not even an exaggeration. And people are pouring their hearts out, having their own personal reckonings. Like, “Oh my God. I have an opportunity to say this out loud, and people will hear me, and I want to get this off of me.” It’s been wonderful to see all these people coming forward and talking about their experiences and sharing this hashtag on social media to say: “You’re not alone.” Particularly people who said it for the first time. You put it out in the world. It came out your lips. You’re still alive. You made it. It’s out there, and you lived.

But I think the media’s done a terrible job of getting into the issue. It’s fed the fire. In those initial articles, women were not calling for anybody’s head. They didn’t say, as a result of this, we want Harvey Weinstein out. We want him dead. The call was, “We want the world to hear what we’ve been through. We want the world to understand the system that we are living in that allowed this [to] happen. We want the world to see what it takes for a woman to survive and thrive in this country.” But we skipped over that. And it became: These women spoke, Harvey Weinstein lost his job. These women spoke, Matt Lauer lost his job. These men spoke, Kevin Spacey lost his job. It became this sicko tennis match, almost. Like, “Ooh, let’s see what’s going to happen next.” The problem is, culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation, it doesn’t happen in the disclosure. Culture shift happens in the public grappling with these questions. So, we have to have, and be, comfortable with, a public grappling. Because nobody has firm, definitive, perfect answers.

When I meet survivors, there’s a part of me that knows. I know by how they approach me; I can feel it. I have been this way before #MeToo went viral. I’ve been in places like Red Lobster—true story—and I went out on a limb, big time. It was a white family in Alabama sitting at the table across from me, and everything in my body knew that that little girl at that table—she might have been about eight—that something had happened to her. The mother went to the bathroom, I just went up and I said, “Your daughter’s so beautiful.” And she’s like, “Oh, thank you.” I said, “I do work with kids and some of the kids I’ve worked with have experienced trauma.” I was being as vague as possible. “And this is going to sound really strange, but if you would talk to your daughter and make sure she’s okay.” I said, “I try to tell all parents that.” She said, “It’s so crazy that you said that. Our family is dealing with an issue . . .” The girl had been touched by a family friend. And me and that mother stood together in the Red Lobster bathroom crying.

This movement is about empathy. I just try to carry the message I wanted when I was a kid: It’s not your fault, it’s not your shame to carry, it’s not your blame. And you’re not out here by yourself; nothing’s wrong with you. There’s no special curse on you that made this happen.

I spoke in Philly the other night and a girl said, “How did you find your voice?” I said, Listen, sweetheart. Your voice will find you. Follow your heart. Your voice will catch up. If you’re passionate about the environment, or racial justice, or whatever it is, try everything. The best advice I got when I was young was that I was powerful. Now. That there was nothing I had to do, or change, or become, to be powerful. Young people feel so limited. It feels out of reach to them, which is unfortunate. They don’t know where to start. Every day I get an email, like, “I want to start a movement, and I’m just trying to figure out how I can get my hashtag to go viral.” And I’m like, Please stop. Just do the work. There are no shortcuts. If #MeToo didn’t go viral last October, I would still be marching around with my little “me too” T-shirt on and trying to get people to talk about it, trying to make a difference.

Excerpted from "Activist: Portraits of Courage by KK Ottesen," out now from Chronicle Books. Used by permission.

If there were any justice in this world, this week’s big 4K and Blu-ray release would’ve been one of the year’s biggest hits. Alas. Also this week: two terrific new indies (one foreign, one doc) and a forgotten ‘90s gem on disc, and a couple of unsung discoveries on your streaming services. Here we go:

ON NETFLIX:

War on Everyone: Writer/director John Michael McDonagh (brother of Three Billboards scribe Martin) returns to the morally-compromised-buddy-cop-movie territory of his 2011 treat The Guard in this 2017 action/comedy, back on Netflix. Resplendent in their three-piece suits, Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård are a pair of cheerfully profane and unapologetically crooked police detectives; they’ve got the rapid-fire timing and bristling familiarity of a good comedy team. Both are great, but Peña is particularly enchanting, channeling the confidence and comic ingenuity of Beverly Hills Cop-era Eddie Murphy. Stylishly executed and ruthlessly paced, it’s got a giddy shoot-the-works spirit and, yes, a moral compass buried deep in its cold, black heart.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

Fast Color: We’ll take this superhero movie over every one of your overstuffed Avengers epics, thank you very much. Like the best of them (including Unbreakable, its clearest influence), Fast Color is less interested in effects and iconography than personality and relationships, here in the form of three generations of women with “abilities,” trying to work through how to use (or not use) them in a world of post-apocalyptic draught. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is as charismatic and magnetic as ever, while Saniyya Sidney makes quite an impression as her daughter. But the most memorable work is from Lorraine Toussaint as the matriarch of this family of special women, and her big climactic scene is a straight-up barnburner. Julia Hart’s direction is both focused and free; this is one of the best movies of the year.

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

Long Day’s Journey into Night: Bi Gan’s half-3D drama is a Mobius loop of past and present, in which, as one character puts it, “Memories mix truth and lies, they appear and vanish before our eyes.” A young man attempts to track down his recently deceased father’s great lost love, his quest intermingling with her past in unexpected, dreamlike ways. It’s moody as hell — the voice-over is hushed and enigmatic, the musical score is languid, and it’s always raining — but never forced or derivative, a journey picture played out in impeccably controlled long takes and images that live in a space between daydream and hallucination. (Includes interviews, featurettes, and trailer.)

Ad Astra: Filmmaker James Gray is a favorite of critics and indie movie fans, but has yet to find a commercial success equal to that specialized enthusiasm. Some hoped that a science fiction movie starring Brad Pitt could close that gap, though the problem is that the very qualities that make his work so special – all on ample display here – are exactly the things that tend to alienate a mainstream audience. Despite its logline and budget, Ad Astra is often dazzlingly experimental; despite its operatically emotional themes, it’s a film of subtlety and nuance. And it contains some of Pitt’s best acting to date, simple yet overwhelming. (Includes audio commentary, deleted sccenes, and featurettes.)

Where’s My Roy Cohn?: In considering the rancid garbage fire that our country has become, it’s not only easy but trite to make big pronouncements like, “To understand Trump, you have to understand Roy Cohn.” But in this case, it’s a direct line: Trump met the legendary junkyard dog lawyer at 23 and considered him a mentor, and his lessons are clear: attack, fight, smear, divert, and never admit you’re wrong. This jam-packed, intelligent bio-doc from director Matt Tyrauner (Studio 54) hits the expected high points — the Rosenbergs, the Army-McCarthy hearings, the rise to power in New York City, his closeted lifestyle and death from AIDS-related illness — but the archival interviews and contemporaneous coverage are still shocking and powerful. This is a scorching portrait of a real S.O.B., and an insightful analysis of the darkness he represents. (Includes audio commentary and Q&A.)

ON BLU-RAY:

Mad Love: As Disney continues to focus on its tentpole-only world-domination strategy, a handful of home video distributors – KL Studio Classics chief among them – have taken up the responsibility of preserving the long-forgotten catalogue of Touchstone Pictures, the Mouse’s once-prolific home for (gasp) mid-budget movies for adult audiences. Mad Love certainly wasn’t one of their essentials, but there’s a lot to like about it: stylish direction by Antonia Bird (Ravenous), a mucho-sexy Drew Barrymore performance, and most of all, its unapologetic and accurate evocation of the end-of-the-world drama tied up in first love. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)

British artist Penny Hardy works in hard, cold materials, yet uses them to convey warmth and emotion. Her creations, life-sized sculptures dramatizing the most extreme of human emotions, are crafted (according to her website) "from found bits and pieces of scrap metal, used to create a piece with renewed life and energy." The results are astonishing, works of raw power and striking ingenuity.

We've picked out a few of our favorites from her "Blown Away" series; you can see them all on her website, and follow her on Facebook.

"You Blew Me Away 8"

"Erosion"

"The Kiss"

"Break Free"

"DUALITY"

"In a Spin"

"You Blew Me Away 2"

"Yin & Yang"

You can see more of Penny Hardy's work by visiting her website and following her on Facebook.

Over the course of a four-plus decade career as pop's premier parodist, "Weird Al" Yankovic has sold more than 12 million albums, earning five Grammys, four gold records, and six platinum. But this month, he's receiving the ultimater recognition of his importance to popular culture: a tribute show at Gallery1988. The L.A.-based gallery's celebration of Yankovic, which opened last Friday, features paintings, graphic design, sculptures, and more, inspired by Yankovic's songs, his 1989 cult movie UHF, and the man himself.

We picked out a few of our favorites; you can check them all out on G1988's site.

Jeff Victor, "Evolution of Weird Al"

digital print

20 x 16 inches

signed, edition of 1

Bob Rissetto, "Just Eat It."

pencil, ink, and digital print on archival print

17.5 x 6.5 inches

framed

Dave Quiggle, "George Newman"

digital print on watercolor paper

12 x 18 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 40

inspired by UHF

Nan Lawson, "Weird"

giclee print

8 x 10 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 20

Brian Methe, "Amish Paradise"

pencil and ink on vellum

8.5 x 11 inches

framed

Kevin Tiernan, "The Dinosaurs Are Running Wild"

giclee print

12 x 18 inches

open edition

Ashton Gallagher, "I'm Your Worst Nightmare"

acrylic on board in handcrafted float frame

4 x 4 inches

framed

inspired by UHF, the Rambo Fantasy

Cuddly Rigor Mortis, "My Bologna"

acrylic on wood

8 x 8 inches

unframed

Kristy Edgar, "Smells Like Nirvana"

paper collage

4 x 6 inches

framed

Stephen Andrade, "Everything You Know Is Wrong"

giclee print

11 x 17 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 25

Attending a film festival in Macao, China, isn’t really all that different than going to one in Park City or Toronto. The food is better, to be sure. And the filmmakers and stars stand awkwardly in front of the audience before the movie rather than after, which is frankly an improvement; the Q&A is necessarily vague and mercilessly brief, and they never go to a microphone in the crowd, with a “less a question than a comment” bearer behind it. Oh, and each screening begins with a series of slightly inscrutable casino hotel commercials, but they’re over pretty quickly.

I found myself there for the 4th International Film Festival and Awards, Macao, IFFAM for short – back in the small Chinese administrative region (formerly a Portuguese colony) after first attending the new-ish fest last year. This time, I had favorite restaurants to return to and transportation knowledge to call upon; I was practically a native. (Okay, not really, at all.) But I did some sight-seeing, enjoyed some excellent food, and saw many good films, some of which might not have crossed my path otherwise.

One of the pleasures (and challenges) of international cinema is the need to recalibrate your viewing requirements – both in terms of narrative and rhythm. Such is the case with Mattie Do’s The Long Walk, which is a visually striking, often haunted picture that also grows frustratingly repetitive and grim the longer it goes. But there’s nevertheless much to recommend here; it’s a moody movie, set in a kinda-sorta future (and doing what the best films of those type do, filling in the fascinating blanks of day-to-day living). At a certain point, I simply gave myself over to its dreamlike imagery and pacing, but even then, I was ready to wake up a bit sooner than I did.

Writer/director Gu Xiaogang’s sprawling family chronicle Dwelling in the Funchun Mountains opens with a busy family dinner sequence, full of overlapping, half-overheard conversations and established relationships, and while it’s easy to pick up on those aesthetic cues and dub the 2.5 hours that follow “Altman-eseque,” it’s also not inaccurate. Tracking this extended family’s interpersonal woes and money troubles over the course of two years, Xiaogang’s film is full of astonishing technical achievements and formal mastery. But what sticks is what happens between the people; the interactions and relationships are so genuine, and the arcs of the characters so grounded, that there’s real power in the picture’s quiet powers of observation.

There’s no shortage of corn in Shinobu Yaguchi’s Dance With Me, yet somehow the ‘90s rom-com tropes (clumsy single gal, guilt-tripping mom, impossibly perfect beau) and ‘00s Jim Carrey comedy gimmick (our heroine is hypnotized to sing and dance whenever she hears music) seem less creaky when viewed through an international lens. It falls apart a bit in the middle stretch, when they start piling up unnecessary plot points and extraneous “danger,” all while nearly forgetting the central gag. But the energy of the dance numbers is irresistible, star Ayaka Miyoshi is a delight, and it’s all pretty sunny and colorful and charming.

The title of Takashi Miike’s First Love isn’t entirely misleading – it is a love story, albeit one fleshed out with boxing, prostitution, drug addiction, decapitation, and the Yakuza. You can see what the prolific and frequently brutalist filmmaker is reaching for here, something at least adjacent to Coen Brothers territory, and kudos to him for the ambition. But he doesn’t quite have either the proper comic sensibility or light touch to pull it off. This is not to imply that it doesn’t have its moments (there are many, particularly in the overstuffed climax), and there’s plenty of style, and he seems to have had a great time making it. I just wish his enthusiasm were a bit more infectious.

The narrative of Ming Liang’s Wisdom Tooth is complex, including corporate intrigue, an oil spill, and surreptitious recordings. But it’s essentially one of trust and betrayal, centered on a brother and sister whose close relationship is put to the test by financial desperation and romantic entanglement. Its relationships are established carefully enough to withstand the occasional loss of bearings in the film’s second half – but even when it wavers, the grounded and intimate (sometimes uncomfortably so) lead performance of Lu Xingchen keeps the picture balanced.

A brother and sister are also at the center of Mateo Bendesky’s Family Members (which played at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year), though they aren’t particularly close at the moment, and the circumstances that have put them together – returning to their home to deal with the murder of their mother and stepfather – don’t seem likely to fix that. Of course, it’s a movie, so they do find some solace in dealing with the immediate aftermath of trauma and grief. To the picture’s credit, none of it seems particularly prescribed or formulaic; the moments of connection are fleeting, the characters believably thorny. This is a very good film, and an understated one, its wit as quiet as its insights.

Aardman’s A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon played like gangbusters in Macao, and of course it did – there’s no language barrier. These are basically silent comedies, in conception and execution; you see these filmmakers working through all the possible variations and complications of their scenarios, as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd (and their gagmen) did. The narrative follows the broad outlines of E.T., with winks to Close Encountersand 2001 (among others), and while it doesn’t surpass the first Shaun movie – there’s nothing nearly as miraculous as that clockwork restaurant sequence – it offers up plenty of laughs and just enough pathos, and its closing scenes are like balm for the soul.

One of the pleasures of attending a distant festival like this is observing the American selections, and how they play to a foreign audience. I certainly found myself fidgeting uncomfortably during portions of A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s story of an anti-Nazi objector in WWII-era Austria – particularly at dialogue like, “Oh my wife, what’s happened to our country? To the land we love?” As for the film itself, it’s Malick’s strongest work in years, and though I continue to struggle with the particulars of his current style, the whispers to God at least have some urgency this time around, asking as they are the biggest imaginable questions of morality and free will. The loosey-goosey, go-with-the-flow camerawork varies from fluid to over-the-top, but the imagery is powerful, and he sees this tough story all the way through.

I sort of love the idea of The Lighthouse representing American cinema at a festival abroad, since Robert Eggers’s batshit crazy going-mad-near-the-sea movie probably doesn’t represent much of anything except how bonkers his brain is. Visually disturbing but wildly funny, it’s a movie with much to say about toxic masculinity without being altogether overt about it. Stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are admirably game, willing to go wherever their director pushes them, but this viewer was most impressed by Eggers’s formal discipline – the manipulation of pace is astonishing, as is the degree to which the director tightens his control as his characters lose theirs. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Domestic critics have spilled quite a bit of ink on how far Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters falls from the rest of his filmography, but I’m not so sure; much like Soderbergh’s Erin Brokovich, which is none-too-subtly evokes, it seems more like a case of an idiosyncratic filmmaker opening up his toolbox for more standard fare, while maintaining an authorial voice. There are, after all, plenty of echoes of Safe in the story of a chemical company poisoning the population, and the paranoia that seems inevitable when discovering that information. And if it’s a familiar tale, the filmmaker’s tiny human touches (the bad case of the shakes his lead character gets after the big dramatic showdown) and attentiveness to character (the complexity of Tim Robbins’s character arc, for example) give it a new coat of attractive paint.

“You knew your mother would go away some day?” the counselor asks her daughter, and it’s true, they both knew, but they didn’t know it would be like this. The wrenching experience of a working mother leaving her daughter is one that transcends professions, but it’s particularly tough in Alice Winocour’s Proxima, where the mother (Eva Green) is an astronaut, and “going away” means a protracted mission on a space station. The achievable balance of work and home is established early on, but this is a whole other thing, and watching her poor daughter fighting for time during her pre-launch visits breaks your heart. This is a movie, at risk of being too syrupy about it, that knows how it feels when your kid hugs you – and what’s worth risking for that feeling.

Hamish Bennett’s Bellbird comes to us from New Zealand, and as if to confirm that fact, Taika Waititi regular Rachel House shows up in the first five minutes. Its quiet wit and shaggy dog style isn’t far removed from his films (his early ones, at least), but Bennett is working in his own key, telling the story of a farming family – we get a sense immediately of their long-established rituals and routines – and the quiet devastation when the matriarch dies suddenly. It is, most of all, a movie about men who don’t really talk about things (“Mum used to do the talking for both of us”), and realize they’re going to have to, sooner or later; laid-back and charming, and its closing passages are absolutely lovely.

Bouyancy, from Australia, is a grim, merciless affair, dramatizing as it does a story set in the world of forced labor in Southeast Asia. But if you can take such a tough sit, it’s worth it – it’s meticulously constructed and (it seems) authentic, tracking a young man who sneaks away from his home (where he can see his entire miserable future stretched out ahead of him) only to land on a fishing boat, where he’s subjected to horrifying conditions, abuse, and worse. But it’s not just a misery parade; writer/director Rodd Rathjen details how the ruthlessness and evil of his keepers spreads to our protagonist, like an infection, and watching him harden through the course of the story is both difficult and inevitable. Rathjen understands how, in most cases, the logical outcome of treating someone like an animal is that, eventually, they will become one.

The metaphor at the center of The Platform is so on the nose as to make the class commentary of something like Snowpiercer seem comparatively subtle – it’s literally about people living in a leveled “pit,” each level visited by a descending platform of food, and thus the people on the lower levels can only survive if the people above them leave some food behind, which they don’t. But I’m not sure that subtlety is warranted (or effective), at this particular cultural moment, and even if that stuff is A Bit Much, the picture still works on a visceral level; it’s a tightly assembled, blood-spattered, flesh-chewing bit of grisliness, and director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia sure knows how to land a jolt.

My festival experienced ended with Juliette Binoche. The fabulous French thespian came in at the end of IFFAM to give an enlightening talk about her career and craft (choice quote: “stand up for yourself, know where the ‘no is, and know where the ‘yes’ is”), followed by a screening of her new film The Truth. In the film, directed by the Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda, Binoche plays the daughter of a famous actress (the great Catherine Deneuve), home with her family as her mother is publishing her memoirs. “I can’t find any truth in here,” the daughter objects, waving a marked-up copy, to which her mother replies, “I’m an actress, I won’t tell the naked truth. It’s less interesting.” Kore-eda may be working with a language barrier (the film is mostly in French, which he does not speak), but he finds plenty of universal truths, both about acting and about family. Word around the festival circuit this year has deemed this a “minor” work, presumably compared to his last picture, the smash Shoplifters. Let’s clear that up here: it’s modest, but that doesn’t make it minor.

Few movie buffs would argue that Sidney Lumet – whose output included such classics as 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict – was one of the finest filmmakers of the 1970s (one of the most important eras in the medium’s history). Yet he’s rarely discussed in the same rarified air as contemporaries like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Frances Ford Coppola; perhaps it’s because he’s no longer with us (he died in 2011), or because his journeyman craftsmanship didn’t leave quite so pronounced an authorial stamp on his work. But there’s no denying the power of a Sidney Lumet picture: grounded, authentic, character-driven, and intelligent.

Columbia University film and literature professor Maura Spiegel will hopefully adjust the conversation to a proper appreciation of his gifts with her new book Sidney Lumet: A Life (out this week from St. Martin’s Publishing Group), the first and likely definitive biography of the late filmmaker. In this excerpt, she walks the reader through the making of one of his finest films: the 1975 Al Pacino vehicle Dog Day Afternoon.

FROM "SIDNEY LUMET: A LIFE":

“What you are about to see is true—It happened in Brooklyn, New York on August 22, 1972.”

-Opening, Dog Day Afternoon

“The day in question was Tuesday, August 22, 1972. The temperature was 97 degrees. I was driving out to Long Island on the expressway, and, as was my custom, I was listening lethargically to the endless repetitious news bullets on WINS. . . . Then suddenly there was real news of the most ridiculous kind. A bank was being held up in Brooklyn. The police had arrived. Hostages were being held. A state of siege was in force. Demands were being made. It was a familiar scenario, but with bizarre variations. One of the bank robbers demanded that his wife be brought to him, and, when the police complied, it turned out that the ‘wife’ was a transvestite. I began to suspect that Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey had staged the whole operation as a tasteless parody of the terrorism around us.”

-Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, September 29, 1975

The day before shooting began on Dog Day Afternoon Pacino got cold feet. As Sidney told it, “He asked me and the screenwriter, Frank Pierson, to come up to his house for some cockamamie reason.” When they got there, Pacino was “crawling around on all fours, barking like a dog.” Sidney’s sensitive query: “Al, what the fuck is this?” Pacino responded that he was “out of control” and that he couldn’t do the film. Pacino was panicked because his career had just taken off and he feared that this role would end it; up to that point no major Hollywood star had played a gay man. Sidney’s strategy was not to try to calm Pacino down, but instead to relate Pacino’s current state of mind to the character of Sonny, “what the character must have felt when he decided to rob the bank.” Sidney was confident that “the actor part of him would be digesting all these feelings and saying, ‘Hey, I can use that in the performance.’” Pacino showed up the next day right on time.

Pacino was in, but he required changes to the script regarding the relationship between Sonny and Leon, his transitioning wife. Footage of their wedding was cut, and a farewell kiss outside the bank was traded for the incredible farewell phone call between the two. Sidney too had worried about audience reaction to that kiss. The balcony reactions at the Loew’s Pitkin in Brooklyn when he was a teenager were alive in his memory, the rowdy boys hooting and booing Leslie Howard, who appeared too effeminate for their taste. He didn’t want anything to push those buttons.

Prior to shooting, Sidney had consulted with the Gay Activists Alliance and gotten a thumbs up. For the filming, Sidney called upon members of the Gay Liberation Movement to be the extras in the crowd, including a teenaged Harvey Fierstein, whom Sidney would later cast in Garbo Talks. The movie was warmly received in the gay press.

Casting Leon, mainstream American movies’ first openly transsexual character, took some time. As Burtt Harris recalled the auditions, “We had every performer, every drag queen performer in New York, and all they ever did was Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke. They almost were identical, until we got Chris Sarandon. His approach was: ‘All I gotta do is be in love with this guy, want to marry him and get a sex change operation. Simple.’” And that fit with Sidney’s idea to treat what could be seen as outrageous in a matter-of-fact manner, relatable. Not to milk it. His famous one-line direction to Sarandon: “A little less Blanche DuBois. A little more Queens housewife.”

Sidney’s characteristic consideration for the people who lived in the vicinity of his location-shooting—including requiring silence of the crew when shooting at night and making sure the lights never got pointed at apartment windows—was ratcheted up since they would be on one Brooklyn block in Prospect Park West for weeks with a massive cast, sirens, and a helicopter overhead. He offered neighbors the option of a paid hotel stay or they were welcome to watch the shooting; heads out of windows would not be out of place.

And unique to this film was Sidney’s use of improvisation. Sidney’s enormous respect for writers had been one of the reasons he had steered away from this process in the past. This time Sidney had the actors improvise dialogue that he recorded and that he and screenwriter Frank Pierson would cull, shape, and give back to the actors. Pacino recalled the process:

With Sidney, he would say, “Okay, we’ve got this scene, we haven’t quite gotten it. Let’s go work on this thing.” Right there, right on the set. And he has me and the actor improvise. . . . Mainly we were able to do it, because we had been working on it for weeks, maybe months, so we know the people we’re playing a little bit. We did three improvisations that he taped of the scene. He takes all the data on that, and he translates it and writes one scene from the three improvisations. You know, you don’t do that with the whole script, but at that particular moment, it was a 15-minute scene, that’s what he did. These are the kinds of things that come up . . . and sometimes you get gold.

Some of the most iconic lines in the film were improvised on camera, including Sonny’s galvanizing “Attica, Attica,” which beloved A.D. Burtt Harris had whispered to Pacino just before the camera rolled. When Sal (John Cazale) answers Sonny’s (Pacino) query about what country he’d like to go to with “Wyoming,” Sidney had to slap his hand over his mouth to silence his laughter so as not to ruin the shot. This was a thrillingly organic process, just exactly right for this great film that earned Sidney his second best directing Oscar nomination, along with nominations for best film, best actor, best actor in a supporting role for Sarandon, and best editing. Frank Pierson won for best original screenplay.

When Sidney was asked about what Pacino had needed to achieve this astonishing performance, Sidney replied with characteristic forthrightness, “The creation of the character is really Al’s own. He understood something about that man that is irreplaceable, and I don’t think a director can ever give—he understood him down to his bone marrow.”

From "Sidney Lumet: A Life" by Maura Spiegel. Copyright © 2019 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Not one, not two, but three of the year’s best movies hit disc or streaming this week, which would be exciting enough on its own. But we’ve also got a restored ‘80s gem, one of the great ‘70s dramas, a new documentary movie lovers will adore, and a gorgeous new addition to the Criterion Collection. Here we go:

ON NETFLIX:

Marriage Story: Noah Baumbach’s most emotionally open picture to date, and his best, clearly inspired by his own separation from Jennifer Jason Leigh and thus pulsing with the pain and bleak comedy of lived experience. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson craft career-best performances as a divorcing couple working through the painstaking process of custody proceedings and other logistics, while still coming to terms with the damage they’ve done to each other. It’s the closest thing Baumbach has done to vintage Paul Mazursky, turning from gutting truth to screwball comedy without losing a step, and the filmmaking, while subtle, is effective – he knows when to let as scene play out in wides, and how to go in for close-ups when his protagonists go for the jugular. In taking his specific experience and addressing it so honestly, Baumbach has performed a tiny miracle: he’s made the confessional universal.

ON BLU-RAY / MUBI:

The Cotton Club Encore: When Francis Ford Coppola’s reunion with Godfather producer Robert Evans was released in 1984, the reviews were middling at best: nice looking, nice effort, but a bit of a mess. Maybe the passage of time has been kind to it – imagine if this were the kind of prestige movie major studios were releasing now – or maybe it’s just that the that changes Coppola has made for this new edit, restoring balance to its two key storylines and its gangster movie/musical elements, really are that significant. Whatever the case, what’s long been considered one of his Interesting ‘80s Failures is clearly one of his undiscovered gems, a snappy, entertaining, sexually and socially complex banger, filled with terrific musical numbers, sharp performances, and tip-top filmmaking. (Also streaming on MUBI, starting 12/13.)

ON DVD / VOD:

Water & Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life: Movies about movies are always a bit of niche proposition; a movie about a cinematographer is basically a niche within a niche. But those who fall within said niche will find much to adore here – how Di Palma shot in black and white, how he made the transition to color, how he painted with light and innovated with fog, and so on. Water and Sugar’s own filmmaking isn’t exactly the height of innovation, but the interviews are informative (Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Lina Wertmüller, Giancarlo Giannini, Michael Ballhaus, and Woody Allen all appear), the tone is warm and loving and sincere, and the story about how he first met Sven Nyvkist is worth the price of the disc alone.

ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

Hustlers: Lorene Scafaria tells the true story of a crew of exotic dancers who took a steady stream of Wall Street types for all they had, merging the thoughtful “commodification in times of economic anxiety” themes of the first Magic Mike with the thrilling energy of vintage Scorsese. But, to be clear, Scafaria has her own voice and eye, seeing past the shiny surfaces of these worlds at the tension and desperation underneath, honing in on the camaraderie that put these women together, and the suspicion that tore them apart. Every performance is a gem, but Jennifer Lopez’s turn as the wisest of the bunch deserves every ounce of praise you’ve heard – it’s a monster, sharp and sexy and complicated, all at once. (Includes audio commentary and trailers.)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Quentin Tarantino’s latest is a lot of things: meticulous period recreation, alternate history, hang-out movie, testament to the considerable gifts of Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, and (especially) Brad Pitt. But most of all, it’s a valentine to Hollywood – not just the industry, but the place itself, and how it widened the eyes of little Quentin, all those years ago. Beyond that, he captures as sense of community, of Hollywood as a place where everyone’s keeping tabs, everyone’s watching the same TV show, everyone knows everyone else – where connections are a kind of currency, so it’s not that difficult for, say, a sociopath with industry ambitions to get too close. All of which he does on the sly, foregrounding a loose shagginess and a narrative patience; though it’s leisurely, nothing is wasted, as even seemingly throwaway character bits pay off in unexpected ways. Tarantino has become such a pro at telling these big-canvas stories, you barely notice he’s picked up the pace until it’s fully cranking. This is a thrilling, funny, endlessly re-watchable picture. (Includes additional scenes and featurettes.)

ON BLU-RAY:

Old Joy: Kelly Reichard’s 2006 road movie (new to the Criterion Collection) initially seems headed in a fairly predictable direction, as two old buddies (Daniel London and Will Oldham) head off for an overnight camping trip and a bit of reconnection. They’ve developed something of an odd couple dynamic with the passing years, and some light comic conflict is created by the responsible, soon-to-be family man’s friction with his freewheeling, couch-surfing, pot-smoking buddy. But the broad strokes conceal real longing and pain, culminating in a startling conclusion of honesty and unexpected intimacy. It’s a whisper-quiet movie, but boy does it knocks you over. (Includes new interviews and conversation featurette.)

Blue Collar: Too hard to see for too damn long, this is one of the great unsung movies of the 1970s. Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) made his directorial debut with the unenviable task of marshaling the hot tempers and combustible personalities of Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto, resulting in a legendarily contentious production. But that discord mirrored the story, of three best friends on the Detroit auto assembly lines who are split apart by business interests and union politics. This a tough, difficult picture, trying but rewarding, and Pryor’s (mostly serious) performance is a straight-up revelation. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)

Finnish street photographer Teemu Jarvinen draws inspiration from the traditions of cyberpunk and film noir, so when he took his camera to Sapporo, Japan earlier this year, he inserted those influences into his images of the city's snowy streetscapes: filled with shadowy figures, dark shadows, unexpected reflections, and neon galore. Many have noted that we're now living in the timeframe of Blade Runner; these images are the closest thing we've found to proof.

To see more of Jarvien's work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram.

To see more of Teemu Jarvien's work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram.

When German-born photographer Andy Schwetz visited the Manicomio di Racconigi, an abandoned insane asylum in Italy, he was struck by the horror of the procedures performed there, from electroshock therapy to experimental operations. He channeled that horror, and his own struggle with mental illness, into these shocking, haunting photographs, which capture both the terror of the facility, and the strange peace that has taken it over since it closed in the 1980s.

You can see more of Schwetz's work on his website, or by following him on Instagram and Flickr.

You can see more of Andy Schwetz's work on his website, or by following him on Instagram and Flickr.

The Brady Bunch is one of the strangest success stories in the history of television, running five modestly-rated and poorly-reviewed seasons from 1969 to 1974, then becoming a (sometimes ironic) hit via its seemingly endless reruns - resulting in big-screen spin-offs, multiple revivals, and a general cultural ubiquity. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of its debut, TV historian and entertainment journalist Kimberly Potts dives into its history with The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch: How the Canceled Sitcom Became the Pop Culture Icon We Are Still Talking About Today (out now from Grand Central Publishing), an all-purpose guide to all things Brady.

In this excerpt, Potts explains into the origin and execution of one of the show's signature touches: its iconic opening credit sequence.

FROM "THE WAY WE ALL BECAME THE BRADY BUNCH"

Schwartz’s next big project was pairing the finished theme song with an opening sequence that would, harkening again back to Gilligan’s Island, make The Brady Bunch a must-visit prime-time destination for viewers from the first seconds to the closing tag scene that punctuated nearly every happy ending.

One of Schwartz’s philosophies of TV production was that “close-ups are what television is all about.” Trying to regularly get close-ups of nine different characters into the episodes would be challenging enough, but trying to get them all into a sixty-second opening would have flummoxed a less creative producer. While sitting in his office doodling ideas one afternoon, Schwartz drew a checkerboard, and immediately recognized it as his solution. Nine squares, nine openings, nine smiling Brady family faces (including Alice!) to fill them. Simple enough.

Except that nothing else about getting The Brady Bunch to the airwaves had been that easy, and this opening sequence, too, would provide a few extra challenges. For one, yes, there were nine smiling faces, but the order in which they appeared in those nine boxes was very important. The six kids were mostly newcomers, but the three adult stars of the show were veterans, with agents to whom details like the exact wording of the introduction for each weekly episode mattered greatly. It was in Ann B. Davis’s contract, forexample, that she would get a unique intro, so she appears last in the opening sequence, in the middle square, with the words “And Ann B. Davis as Alice” providing a shout-out to her status as an Emmy-winning comedy veteran.

For the Brady parents, Florence Henderson’s face is the first one that pops up in the checkerboard (or tic-tac-toe board, grid, Brady box, and many other terms people have used to describe that three-by-three square that we all agree reminds us immediately of The Brady Bunch). The girls appear to her left on the screen, followed by Robert Reed and the Brady boys, to his right onscreen. But when it comes to textual billing of the stars’ names, Reed’s name appears first, then Henderson’s. Davis’s special credit is the last name in the sequence; the kiddos’ names aren’t displayed at all, and those precise details are all a result of contractual obligations.

With those general decisions made about the overall layout of the grid, Schwartz knew he wanted something more than a static image to greet viewers at their TV sets when “Here’s the story . . . ” started to play. Visual effects artist Howard Anderson would sprinkle something extra on the tic-tac-toe idea to make it the oft-copied icon of graphic design and ensemble roundup videos the Brady opening became.

It wasn’t Anderson’s first time at the TV title sequence rodeo.

His father, Howard Sr., was a Hollywood special effects whiz who created the storm effects for Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, the 1927 middle movie of the filmmaker’s trilogy of biblical stories. As a preteen, Anderson Jr. worked at the special effects company his dad launched, and after stints at UCLA, as a camera operator, and in the Navy, he joined the family business in 1946 with his brother and helped run it for nearly five decades.

Among the younger Anderson’s most famous projects: the title sequences for I Love Lucy and The Addams Family, and later, Cheers, Charlie’s Angels, Happy Days, and Little House on the Prairie. Lucy’s satin heart, the snapping fingers in the Addams opener, and the spinning record and neon title of Happy Days were all handiwork of Anderson and his company.

As well as Star Trek. Anderson and his brother Darrell created the opening credits for Gene Roddenberry’s hit (one of the only TV series to enjoy an enduring pop culture presence that rivals The Brady Bunch), and just as importantly, they were responsible for the transporter effects. Scotty’s ability to beam Captain Kirk and anyone else onto the starship Enterprise was made possible by the fine work of the Anderson brothers. It was Howard Anderson’s idea to film individual videos o feach of the nine Brady Bunch cast members looking up, down, to the left, to the right, to the upper left and right corners, to the lower left and right corners, and straight ahead. Howard personally shot the videos, directing the actors to hit all the directional looks and hold each one for five seconds, as he had meticulously planned the timing of the looks to match up with specific lyrics in the theme song. The looks on their faces in those moments? Actor’s choice (Anderson confessed he was partial to Florence Henderson’s facial expressions in the opening credits). Speaking of confessions, the Andersons did additional effects work for The Bunch throughout the series, including Peter being haunted by the ball that breaks his mom’s favorite vase in the dream sequence of season two’s “Confessions, Confessions.” For the opening credits, the key to making Schwartz’s idea and Anderson’s vision a reality was the multi-dynamic image technique, a creation by Canadian filmmaker Christopher Chapman. All nine videos could be merged into one, with eachseparate section showing one of the Bradys looking all around the grid to his or her siblings and parents in their own individual squares.

Chapman invented the process for his film A Place to Stand, produced for the World’s Fair event Expo 67, a celebration of Canada’s centennialyear, in Montreal. The movie was a dialogueless, eighteen-minute ode to life in Ontario, and before it won the Oscar for best live action short, more than two million people, some waiting in line for hours, saw it inthe Ontario Pavilion at Expo 67. Chapman, hired by the Canadian government to make the film, spent a year shooting footage of Ontarians at work and play. He shot the province’s most beautiful locations, from city to farms, sunny waterfronts to snowy ponds where a father, his son, and a dog were ice-fishing with a tree branch. He zoomed in on a little boy and a sports fan noshing on hot dogs, alongside video of frankfurter buns baking inside a factory. Using his original technique,he was able to show as many as fifteen images at a time on-screen, and fill those eighteen minutes of documentary running time with nearly ninety minutes of footage. An estimated 100 million people across the world saw Chapman’s film when it was released into theaters, but that’s just a fraction of those who’ve seen the split-screen innovation in action since. Steve McQueen was such a fan of the work after seeing it in a private screening that he recommended Norman Jewison, his director on The Thomas Crown Affair, see A Place to Stand. Jewison did, and decided to use the multi-image process in that 1968 Oscar-winning film’s memorable opening sequence. But most viewers will recognize the technique from television, where it’s been used in the credit sequences for Mannix, Barnaby Jones, Dallas, The Bob Newhart Show, and24.

And, of course, The Brady Bunch. In the Hollywood Reporter headline on Christopher Chapman’s 2015 obituary, he was credited as the “Oscar-Winning Creator of ‘The Brady Bunch’ Effect.”

Excerpted from "THE WAY WE ALL BECAME THE BRADY BUNCH: How the Canceled Sitcom Became the Beloved Pop Culture Icon We Are Still Talking About Today." Copyright © 2019 by Kimberly Potts. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Agnieszka Nienartowicz's work is a series of illusions and contradictions, in the best possible way: she crafts what appear, at first glance, to be photographs of women with tattoos of classic works of art. Only on closer examination does it become clear that these are themselves hyperrealistic paintings, replicating not only the style of the old masters, but the realism of the human canvas.

Nienartowicz came to our attention via My Modern Met; you can see more of her incredible paintings on her website, or by following her on Instagram and Facebook. Here are some of our favorites.

“Lost Hope” (after Guido Reni)

“The Great Wave” (after Hokusai Katsushika)

“What You Really Want” (after Sandro Botticelli)

“Medusa” (after Caravaggio)

“Hunting” (after Paolo Uccello)

“Girl with the Tattoo” (after Rogier van der Weyden)

“Melancholy” (after Arcimboldo)

“Girl in White” (triptych) (after Hans Memling)

One of the year’s best movies pops up on Amazon Prime this week, and a delicious horror/action/comedy leads the new disc releases. Plus, a first-rate bio-doc, two new Criterion additions, and an always-rewatchable Best Picture winner returns to Netflix. Heat up some Thanksgiving leftovers, and let’s get to work:

ON NETFLIX:

The Departed: Martin Scorsese’s only Best Picture and Best Director winner makes a presumably Irishman-prompted return to Netflix, and while that Oscar success gave this remake of the Hong Kong policer Infernal Affairs a sheen of respectability, so it’s easy to forget what a dirty bomb it was when it landed in theaters back in 2006. After a period in which the filmmaker seemed bent on becoming a classicist, like his heroes Powell and Pressburger, here was a crackerjack thriller filled with shocking jolts and dirty jokes, a reminder of how much fun he could have making a pop picture. And after years of experimentation and boundary pushing, it was the kind of movie he made better than anybody: a tough, brutal, emotionally wrenching crime potboiler with a healthy dose of black comedy.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

The Report: Well, here’s something timely: a whistleblower story. Scott Z. Burns, best known as frequent screenwriter for Steven Soderbergh, makes his directorial debut in this gripping dramatization of analyst Daniel J. Jones’s investigation the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the CIA Detention and Torture Program. His script cleverly toggles timelines, dramatizing what Jones discovers (namely, the repugnant details of these interrogations) as he discovers it. Burns unsurprisingly but wisely embraces an All the President’s Men aesthetic, dwelling in grim, ugly work spaces and underlit conference rooms, sharing his protagonist’s claustrophobia. And Adam Driver (who is having one hell of a fall) crafts a beautifully modulated performance as Jones, evolving from a straight-arrow to a furious advocate; we watch his slow fuse turn into a live wire. This is a sharp, complicated movie, and an infuriating one.

ON DVD / VOD:

Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins: Early in Janice Engel’s profile of the beloved (and reviled) political commentator, we see her explain why she got into journalism: “To do good and raise hell and learn.” She did all three. This masterfully cut and endlessly funny documentary tells a uniquely American story, and a mini-history of contemporary journalism to boot, following Ivins through various gigs and markets, watching her try (and often fail) to find her place, before settling in as a columnist who became the single most incisive critic of George W. Bush and his administration. But the genius of Engel’s approach is its refusal to cast itself as history, and its best passages intercut her political theory with specific, modern examples. In doing so, she brings Ivins’ words from the past into the present — where we need them more than ever. (Includes additional Ivins clips.)

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

Ready or Not: Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett craft a furiously funny and cheerfully gory mash-up of class satire and horror comedy, anchored by a terrific lead performance by Samara Weaving; she may look like Margot Robbie, but her work here seems most inspired by Marilyn Burns. Marrying into an absurdly rich family, she finds herself trapped in a wedding-night “initiation” game with decidedly deadly consequences. That’s a good set-up, and the filmmakers wind it up tight and then just let it spin, all the way through to its deliciously blood-spattered conclusion. Not for the weak of stomach, but that warning aside, this is one of the most pleasurable genre exercises of the year. (Includes audio commentary, gag reel, and featurette.)

ON BLU-RAY:

The Story of Temple Drake: Stephen Roberts’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary – new to the Criterion Collection - was one of the tipping points of the Pre-Code era, a film so controversial (and, its detractors held, indecent) that it helped bring the loose enforcement of content restrictions in that era to an end. It’s easy to see why – it’s a tough piece of work, dramatizing the story of a good-time girl’s descent into hell with eye-opening candor, sliding from a winking nudge-fest into a nightmarish fever dream. Miriam Hopkins is terrific in the title role, embracing the bad-girl friskiness of the early scenes and toughening up before your very eyes, while Karl Struss’s cinematography is (as per usual) extraordinary. (Includes new interviews and conversations on the film.)

Tunes of Glory: This psychological military drama from director Ronald Neame (Hopscotch) gets a Blu-ray bump from Criterion, and it’s a sharp, forceful, complicated picture. James Kennaway’s script (based on his novel) initially paints in fairy broad strokes, pitting a jocular Major (Alec Guinness) against an incoming, by-the-book Lieutenant Colonel (John Wills) in a classic battle of morale vs. morality. But these two seemingly contrary figures turn out to be closer in temperament than they think. Millis does wonders as the career military men who’s more vulnerable than he seems, and this is some of Guinness’s best work, capped by a breakdown scene that’s stunning in its precision and weight. (Includes archival interviews and trailer.)

The end of the year is upon us, prompting a real embarrassment of riches at the movies – as if there weren’t alreadytoo many great movies (The Irishman, Knives Out, Marriage Story, Honey Boy, The Report, etc.) to clear time out of your busy schedule to see, we’ve got even more films vying for those year-end best-of slots and awards nominations. It’s okay. Take a deep breath. You can sleep in January.

Thanksgiving week is upon us again, and you know what that means: it’s time to start thinking about some gift-giving. (Or maybe not! Things are tight all over, that’s undeniable, and if the holidays have always been overtly commercialized, they seem even more so lately. Feel no obligation to buy anyone anything! Thanks for clicking.)

As per usual, Flavorwire is here to help you with that especially hard-to-shop-for friend, relative, or significant other, you know the one, the one who’s super into movies and books and music and seems especially hard to shop for because it feels like they have every damn thing. Luckily, these people are known marks, willing to buy and re-buy things they like/things that are adjacent to the things they like, so we’ve got a full list of books and discs and records they’ll love, organized by the object of your affection. Happy holidays – and happy hunting.

FOR MOVIE BUFFS (BOOK EDITION)

Back in 2013, after the tragic shuttering of the great film site The Dissolve (RIP), distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories and Scott Tobias (one of the site’s editors) began an ambitious venture: a new, side site for Oscilloscope called Musings, in which film writers could explore the history of the medium and the great films within it, without being tied to the click-demanding confines of new releases and significant anniversaries. And now we have Musings: Volume One and Musings: Volume Two, a pair of lovingly curated volumes of the best writing from that site, by some of our favorite film writers, including K. Austin Collins, Alissa Wilkinson, Matthew Dessem, Keith Phipps, April Wolfe, Bilge Ebiri, and Flavorwire alums Judy Berman and Alison Nastasi. If you’re shopping for someone whose tastes lean more towards the classics, good news: Letters from Hollywood is a fascinating peek behind the curtains of the industry – or, more accurately, into its offices and boardrooms, compiling memos, notes, letters, and telegrams from executives, filmmakers, and stars. Plenty of books dive into what’s on the screen; few are this fascinated with exactly how it got there. And if their tastes run wilder, there’s a new volume of Werner Herzog’s Scenarios, which we told you about in this space last year; the idiosyncratic filmmaker’s screenplays are less “scripts” than free-flowing novellas, and Scenarios III includes his treatments of Stroszek, Nosferatu, Where the Green Ants Dream, and Cobra Verde.

FOR ACTION LOVERS

If someone in your family or crew of friends adores action/adventure movies – and has the full set-up, with the big-screen TV and 4K disc player – look no further. The new 007: The Daniel Craig Collection presents Mr. Craig’s four outings as James Bond (Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and SPECTRE) in glorious 4K and subwoofer-rumbling sound, to better immerse yourself in 007’s adventures. Or you can pick up Mission: Impossible – 6-Movie Collection, which assembles all the entries to date of the only all-good franchise (look into your hearts, you know it’s true). And if you think they’re covered by having these on Blu-ray already, well, take a look at those big IMAX action scenes in 4K, and think again.

FOR MOVIE PEOPLE WHO ALSO LOVE ARCHITECTURE?

Why did movie villains always have the good cars, the good toys, and most importantly, the good hideouts? Look to Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, which takes an up-close look at the homes of the bad guys in Body Double, Superman, North by Northwest, Ex Machina, Dr. Strangelove, and, yes, several Bond movies. With still photographs, meticulous architectural illustrations and renderings (by Carlos Fueyo), text, and interviews, editor Chad Oppenheim investigates what these lairs say about both their films’ contemporary architecture and society – and how they influenced both.

FOR COMEDY GEEKS

For the past two-plus decades, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has collected some of the finest and funniest writing on the web – so much so that their new collection of those pieces, Keep Scrolling Till You Feel Something, is as thick as a Bible. So they just leaned into that, with appropriate art and binding surrounding uproarious pieces by John Hodgman, Ellie Kemper, Megan Amram, Mike Sacks, Jesse Eisenberg, Josh Gondelman, and many, many more. Those who like their comedy a little more old-school (and on their TV or laptop screens) will want to grab Shout Select’s new Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection, which gives the Blu-ray bump to an astonishing twenty-eight of their classic comedies, including Buck Privates, Who Done It?, Hold That Ghost, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (and the Invisible Man, and the Mummy, and…).

FOR GAMES-PLAYERS

The box for Cinephile: A Card Game is small, and the set-up seems simple: a couple of decks of cards, a pad for notes, and instructions. But that simplicity is deceptive. Players can use those cards – which feature a variety of classic and contemporary actors, in one of their best-known roles – to play five different, ingenious games, drawing on the player’s knowledge of their filmographies. It’s a terrific party game for movie geeks. If you’re shopping for a music geek instead, grab The NME Music Quiz Book, which collects over one thousand questions from the beloved music mag’s 66-year history (!!), on topics ranging from all-time bestsellers to near-death experiences.

FOR SHORT STORY READERS

If you like to give gifts early, you’re in luck: Hingston and Olsen are back with another edition of their Short Story Advent Calendar, which offers up a daily dose of short fiction (from the likes of Lauren Groff, Anthony Doerr, Omar El Akkad, Ian Williams, and Casey Plett)– one per day, through the holidays. And if you want to get your reader recipient ready for next fall, or just want them to enjoy a spooky Christmas, the publisher also has Ghost Box III, the latest (and last) installment of the individually-wrapped scary story series edited and introduced by Patton Oswalt, with stories by Richard Matheson, Poppy Z. Brite, Gertrude Atherton, and many more.

FOR NOSTALGISTS

When Cobra Kai, the 34-years-later series sequel to the Karate Kid movies, premiered on YouTube Premiere last year, it sounded like the worst kind of desperate, nostalgia-tinged cash grab. Instead, viewers were treated to an uncommonly thoughtful (and still cleverly entertaining) meditation on dwelling in the past and living in the future, drawing heavily on co-star/co-executive producers Ralph Macchio and William Zaba’s complicated feelings on living with these characters for all these years. YouTube’s premium channel is still a bit spottily-viewed, so the new Cobra Kai Collector’s Edition: Season 1 & 2 DVD set should relieve fans (who even get a two-sided headband for their trouble). And Star Trek lovers, the original superfans, will delight in the Picard Movie & TV Collection, which assembles (in advance of the forthcoming Star Trek: Picard CBS All-Access spin-off series) all four of Patrick Stewart’s big-screen adventures as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and two double-length TNG episodes, for one low price.

FOR MUSIC LOVERS

Mary J. Blige’s HerStory, Vol 1, assembling her first batch of brilliant ‘90s hits, is getting the treatment you’d expect for a music legend: CD, 2LP, and digital versions. But the true fan of Queen Mary J. will want the real “box set,” which collects her first eight singles on 45rpm, with contemporaneous remixes on the B-sides. They’re a little more work to listen to, but boy are they worth it – those first records still crackle with her scrappy energy and attitude, and remain some of the finest R&B recordings of the era. And if you’ve got a classic rock fan on your list, it’s become easy to take Apple’s annual 40th anniversary reissues of the Beatles’ discography for granted – but the new Abbey Road Anniversary Edition is one of the best of the series, with gorgeous new mixes of the original, classic album (on both CD and a stunning Blu-ray) and two session discs, featuring working versions, outtakes, and alternate versions from the Fab Four’s final time together in the studio. (Vinyl versions are also available of this one.)

FOR MOVIE BUFFS (BLU-RAY EDITION)

As the Criterion Collection neared spine number #100, cinephiles speculated in hush tones over what might get that milestone marker – presumably something Important and Serious, like the Ingmar Bergman box set (a highlight of last year’s guide). Instead, Criterion went full-on fun, with Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954-1975, a knockout Blu-ray collection of fifteen Godzilla classics, in their original form, plus the usual assortment of peerless Criterion extras. It’s a must-have for fans of genre cinema, Japanese filmmaking, and, well, giant friggin’ monster movies. If your film fan leans towards older (and, okay, a bit more serious) fare, then Kino-Lorber’s Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection is the way to go. This excellent box collects four selections – The Bigamist, Never Fear, Not Wanted, and the stunning The Hitch-Hiker – from Lupino, the groundbreaking female filmmaker of the 1940s and 1950s. So they’re vital from a historical standpoint, but they’re also a blast, tasty slices of vintage drama and noir from a true master. And if your cinephile’s tastes run a little… well, let’s just come out and say it, pervier, Kino Lorber has also granted us the gift of The 3-D Nutie-Cuties Collection, restoring two rare three-dimensional sexploitation features (and a pair of shorts). And, bonus, one of them is The Bellboy and the Playgirls, a film whose 3-D sequences were directed by a hungry young filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola.

FOR BOOKISH FEMINISTS

The Folio Society’s handsomely bound and beautifully illustrated editions of classic books are ideal for the bibliophile on your list, and two recent releases are especially ideal for anyone with an interest in women and their stories. Helen Castor’s Joan of Arc: A History was already an essential read; the Folio edition supplements Castor’s meticulously researched text with illustrations, maps, and a new introduction by the author (read an excerpt here). And while The Handmaid’s Tale is presumably in any applicable library, Folio Society’s edition of Oryx and Crake shines a spotlight on one of Margaret Atwood’s other essentials; check out a gallery of its illustrations by Harriet Lee-Merrion here.

FOR COMIC BOOK LOVERS

But Folio’s crowning achievement of the season is their heavyweight Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949, a beautiful, hardbound collection of four full-color classics from the forties (The Sub-Mariner #1, The Human Torch #5, Captain America Comics #10, and All Winners Comics #19), plus a stand-alone recreation of Marvel Comics #1, dated October 1939. The art is gorgeous and the storytelling is sharp, but this collection is also a frankly heart-warming reminder that once upon a time, this dominating cultural force was just an upstart comic book label, telling timely stories with bold new heroes.

FOR LYNCHIANS

Look, I know the last thing you want to hear about is a new Twin Peaks box set - after all, they've already put out the original series on Blu-ray twice, and The Return once. But here's the thing: Twin Peaks: From Z to A is kind of essential anyway, collecting every damn piece of David Lynch and Mark Frost's innovative and brilliant series in one place: all three seasons, Fire Walk with Me, The Missing Pieces, tons of behind-the-scenes stuff, and 4K UltraHD versions of the original series pilot and the mind-melting eigth episode of the most recent series. And it's ingeniously put together, making it, y'know, a great gift.

FOR HOLIDAY FOLKS

Some people just live and breathe the holidays, and as soon as Christmas has passed, they’re ready for it to come back around again. So why not keep them in the spirit with great holiday movies? Paramount just put out a drop-dead gorgeous 4K version of It’s a Wonderful Life, which also includes the film’s already stellar Blu-ray edition; it’s one of the all-time holiday classics for a reason. And don’t forget, in its big “Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!” climax, George Bailey lobs a holiday greeting at the movie house, which is playing The Bells of St. Mary’s – which itself has a sharp new Blu-ray special edition out for the season. And that, my friends, is a feel-good double-feature.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and you know what that means (aside from family get-togethers and eating too much and ill-advised shopping expeditions): it's time to watch some holiday movies. Of course, our pop culture-loving friends at Gallery1988 are already on it: last Friday, they opened their latest show, "Sh*tter's Full," which includes new art inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (of course), Elf, Love, Actually, and many more seasonal favorites. You can check out the whole shebang here, and we've picked a few of our faves below.

Mark Bell, "Shoot the Glass"

giclee print on 300gsm cotton

12 x 16.25 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 35

inspired by Die Hard

Poppy Small, "Why is it snowing, grandma?

giclee print

11.69 x 16.53 inches

open edition

inspired by Edward Scissorhands

Jeremy Berkley, "Good News"

silkscreen print

14 x 11 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 50

inspired by Elf

Mikey Jay, "Pfeiffer's Catwoman" Print

archival cotton rag

24 x 24 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 5

inspired by Batman Returns

Toddbot, "Jack Skellington with snowflake"

digital print

4 x 6 inches

open edition

inspired by Nightmare Before Christmas

Teo Zirinis, "You Have to Pay for Your Pizza, Sir"

giclee print on archival paper

8 x 6 inches

open edition

inspired by Home Alone

Matt Talbot, "Leaving Wichita"

5-color screenprint

24 x 18 inches

open edition

inspired by Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Jellykoe, "A Griswold Christmas"

print on archival felt cover stock

11 x 14 inches

signed, open edition

inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Erin Gallagher, "The Chance of a Lifetime"

digital print

8.5 x 11 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 25

inspired by It's A Wonderful Life

Brad Albright, "I Feel It In My Fingers, I Feel It In My Toes"

archival giclee

8 x 10 inches

signed and numbered, limited edition of 12

inspired by Love Actually

You can tell the Thanksgiving holidays are upon us, for two reasons: 1) Netflix is unleashing its biggest movie to date, with a three-and-a-half-hour running time that’s perfect for post-Thanksgiving nothing-to-do time; and 2) several of our favorite catalogue distributors are releasing shiny new discs of holiday classics. All that, and much more, below:

ON NETFLIX:

The Irishman: The idea of being a part of history – of not just observing it, but seizing it and forming it – looms large over Martin Scorsese’s latest, a movie that knows that, at the end of the day, the ones who shape history are often those who just happen to be around. Robert De Niro is terrific as one of those men, a mob enforcer whose lifetime of casual crimes and unapologetic tough stuff lead him to a job he does not want, a trigger he cannot pull, but must. Al Pacino is just ferocious as Jimmy Hoffa, chewing up these big speeches but turning into a big pussycat around the people he cares about, perhaps to his detriment. And Joe Pesci is stunning as a boss of quiet power, a man who never raises his voice – in other words, the kind of character we’ve rarely seen him play. Scorsese is, simply, a modern master, and this is one of his finest works.

ON HULU:

Booksmart: Actor-turned-filmmaker Olivia Wilde helms this uproariously funny last-night-of-high-school comedy, in which a pair of straight-A students (Beanie Feldsteinand Kaitlyn Dever, both terrific) realize they were so busy studying that they never cut loose, so it’s time to finally do that. The expected adventures with drinking and drugs and sex ensue, but Booksmartworks because of the gravity of the relationship at its center – it’s a film well acquainted with the specific, do-or-die intensity of adolescent friendships, which, let’s face it, we never quite replicate as adults.

ON BLU-RAY:

All About Eve: It’s one hell of a month to be a Bette Davis fan. She’s the “Star of the Month” over at Turner Classic Movies, which means we got a full day of her vehicles every Tuesday (including a fair number of wonderful but long-forgotten Pre-Code pictures); on December 1, The Criterion Channel will begins streaming a program of 18 Davis pictures. And today, Criterion is putting out gorgeous new editions of two of her classics. Eve may well be her best-remembered feature, and for good reason: this inside-showbiz comedy/drama from writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz is full of quotable dialogue, memorable characters, a timelessly compelling understudy-ruthlessly-takes-over narrative, and unforgettable turns by not only Davis but Anne Baxter, George Saders, and a young up-and-comer named Marilyn Monroe. It all adds up, as Ms. Davis puts it, to quite the bumpy night. (Includes audio commentaries, four documentary/featurettes, new and archival interviews, radio adaption, and Dick Cavett Show episodes.)

Now, Voyager: Davis is nearly unrecognizable, at least in the early scenes of Irving Rapper’s 1942 melodrama, in the mousy glasses and severe hair she dons to play the emotionally stunted daughter of a domineering, rich mother (Gladys Cooper). But after a revitalizing ocean voyage – and an emotionally intense onboard affair with an unhappily married stranger (Paul Henried), she finds herself exerting her strength and personality. Rapper’s direction is marvelous – there’s a shot of her mother tapping a bedpost that is so striking, I found myself lunging for the pause button. And Davis is simply spectacular in the role; just watch what she’s doing with her face and eyes when she tells her mother, “I’m not afraid,” and then repeats it, realizing it’s not a bluff, willing it into existence. (Includes new and archival interviews, selected-scene commentary, radio adaptations, and Dick Cavett Show episode.)

The Bells of St. Mary’s: Just in time for the holidays, Olive Signature Collection has a beautiful new disc of director Leo McCarey and star Bing Crosby’s follow-up to their 1944 Oscar winner Going My Way. Crosby won Best Actor for that performance as Father O’Malley, and he’s even more comfortable than usual here (which is saying something), as his easygoing, streetwise priest butts heads with Ingrid Bergman’s Sister Benedict, the head of St. Mary’s parochial school. Warm, winning, and funny, and Bergman will absolutely break your heart. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, and radio adaptations.)

The Holly and the Ivy: KL Studio Classics are also getting in on the holiday classics fun, first with this charming 1952 comedy/drama from director George More O’Ferrall. Based on Wynyard Browne’s play, it concerns a family at various personal crossroads – chief among them the patriarch, Reverend Martin Gregory (the wonderful Ralph Richardson), whose family’s long-buried resentments come to the surface over the holidays, as these thing often do. Holly is a “classic,” to be sure, but its thoughtful, complicated conflicts and strained interpersonal dynamics play as especially contemporary and sophisticated. (Includes audio commentary and trailers.)

Christmas in July: And one more holiday comedy, though it’s a holiday in name only. Helmed in the middle of a stunning two-year, four-film winning streak that also included The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, and Sullivan’s Travels, writer/director Preston Sturges tells the story of a desk clerk (a delightful Dick Powell) with dreams of winning a big advertising contest. His office “friends” decide to fake it like he won – prompting a spending spree that takes a bit of delicacy to walk back. As usual, Sturges is a master of screwball logic, working through every complication and conflict for maximum comic effect, and his company of comic supporting players is as sharply deployed as ever. Christmas in July isn’t usually mentioned among his classics, but for this viewer’s money, it’s every bit their equal. (Includes audio commentary and trailers.)

Back in January of 2017, photographers Kelly Pratt Kreidich and Ian Kreidich hit upon a new idea. For years, they'd specialized in photographing professional dancers; what if, just for fun, they tried photographing some of those dancers with the dogs, using composition and choreography to capture the relationship between these people and their pups?

One hundred dogs and dancers later, Dancers & Dogs is not only a web favorite, but a full-length art book, available now for your viewing pleasure. We've selected a few of our favorite images; see more of the project here, and order the book here, or follow Dancers & Dogs on Instagram and Facebook.

Sarah Hayes Harkins and Pippa

Acee Francis Laird and Gandalf

Elisabeth Beyer and Tulip

Ever Larson and Griffin

Carlos Gonzalez and Blue

Ashley Lew and Loki

Devon Teuscher and Riley

Jolie Rose Lombardo and Stitch

Izzy Mendez and Charlie

Bianca Bulle, Hero, Marvel, and Loki

You can see more of the Dancers & Dogs project here, and order the book here, or follow Dancers & Dogs on Instagram and Facebook. You can also check out more of the Kreidiches work here

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out opens with the image of a giant manor house. Strings surge loudly on the soundtrack; hounds run from the estate in slow-motion. This, folks, is how you open your movie – with big, broad, theatrical gestures, acknowledging the traditions you’re working within, and will, if you’re clever, subvert. It’s a note so deliciously right that we settle in; we’re in good hands here.

Johnson has somehow become a divisive filmmaker, which is peculiar, since all he’s done is make a bunch of terrific entertainments (including easily the best Star Wars movie in thirty-plus years), but fine. His latest feels less like a follow-up than a reaction, an opportunity to flex different muscles; it’s much closer to his 2008 feature The Brothers Bloom, a joyous, wind-up toy of movie that has gone, alas, sadly underseen.

That picture immerses itself in the language and conventions of the con-man movie, though it takes pride in gleefully coloring outside those lines. Knives Out does something similar, staking a claim in the visual and narrative tropes of the Agatha Christie-style whodunit; they’re the kind of books its focal character, the deliciously named Harlan Thrombey, has made his fortune writing (over 80 million copies sold, we’re told.) Those words have paid for his mansion – “The guy practically lives in a Clue board,” notes Lakeith Stanfield’s police detective – and have bankrolled the activities of his three children, and their children. But on his 85th birthday, he’s decided to cut them all off, so when he turns up dead the morning after his big birthday party, just about anyone could be responsible.

None of this is revealed in the ways you’d expect. His throat is cut, and his death is presumed a suicide; only a week later is the family reunited for follow-up interviews, this time with Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a “private investigator of great renown,” sitting in. And thus, Johnson’s clever screenplay is toggling between these conversations and the events described, which are invariably shaded by the prejudices and pride of the tellers. And the director nimbly hopscotches between those cross-examinations, because they all contradict each other as well, constructing a series of marvelously intermingled interrogations that play like a 21st century Rashomon remix.

All of this is clockwork, tight as a drum, but that’s just the beginning of the filmmaker’s invention. Around forty minutes in, he casually gives up the entire plot, clueing us in on who did it, and how – and so from then on, we’re waiting for Blanc to catch up with us, rather than the other way around. (It’s the Columbo over Christie approach). And thus big clues and little giveaways are dangled, for the viewer to anxiously await discovery, and even then, it’s not simple; slyly, in turn after turn, he yanks off the tablecloth again.

Delving any deeper into the plot means stepping into spoiler territory, which would be a crime in itself; one of the most thrilling aspects of Knives Out is the precision and deftness with which it doles out information. Suffice it to say that the games Johnson plays with audience sympathy – with which characters we want to get away with something – are ingenious. And the ensemble cast is tip-top; Christopher Plummer is fierce and feisty as the deceased, Toni Collette is uproariously funny as a JV Gwyneth Paltrow, Jamie Lee Curtis’s comic timing has never been sharper, and Chris Evans is clearly having a blast playing, well, the anti-Captain America. But special note must be made of Ana de Armas, who is handed a movie-star role, and fills it; watch closely, the pause Johnson lets her take (in the midst of his Rube Goldberg machine of a movie) to grieve for Plummer, before the movie must progress. Any actor who can take you where she does, in that briefest of moments, can write her own ticket.

Johnson’s script is such a crackler that it’s easy to focus one’s praise there, undervaluing his zippy direction, full of elegant compositions, snazzy camera movements, imaginative needle drops (I never thought I’d describe Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” as “haunted,” but here we are), and, yes, even a car chase – in a Hyundai, no less. But this is going to happen, because that script is such a brain-bender, up to and through a third act that turns all of the conventions and expectations inside out, seeming to tell us everything, and doing nothing of the sort. Mainstream movies have all but forgotten how to work to entertain us, not by the lumbering heft of their effort (in budgets, in effect, in inter-connectedness), but by puzzling out ways to put on a good goddamn show, without talking down to (or over) the audience. Knives Out does that, and well. It’s pure pleasure.

"Knives Out" is in theaters Wednesday.

When novelist Elena Ferrante embarked on a year of writing weekly columns for The Guardian, she saw it as a writing challenge - to work as, in her words, "an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that—if I have the will and the time—I’d like to develop within real narrative mechanisms."

Those columns, ranging a wide variety of topics suggested by her Guardian editors, are collected in the new volume Incidental Inventions, translated by Ann Goldstein (the acclaimed translator of Ferrante’s novels) and accompanied by Andrea Ucini’s illustrations. We're honored to present this excerpt.

"MOTHERS" (25 August 2018):

My mother was very beautiful and very clever, like all mammas, so I loved her and hated her. I began to hate her when I was around ten, maybe because I loved her so much that the idea of losing her threw me into a permanent state of anxiety, and to calm myself I had to belittle her.

Sometimes she seemed to me to be beautiful and clever just so that everyone would see me as ugly and stupid. I couldn’t think any thought of my own; I had only her thoughts in my mind. I felt oppressed, tormented by her mania for order, by her outmoded tastes that suffocated mine, by her idea of just and unjust. For a long time, I felt that to stop loving her was the only way I had to love myself— even to have a myself to love.

A secret cord that can’t be cut binds us to the bodies of our mothers: there is no way to detach ourselves, or at least I’ve never managed to. It’s impossible to go back inside her; it’s hard to move past her shadow.

So I quickly put many other bodies between hers and mine—bodies with which I could be the boss, quarrel, make love, appear wise or foolish—constructing a world alien to hers. I wanted her to feel uneasy if she merely looked in on it: that happened often, and she escaped in silence.

Over the years, she withdrew. She got smaller, she lost beauty and cleverness, she stopped asserting her own superiority in everything, her words no longer had weight.

For a while I felt free. Then people began to say things like, “You laugh like your mother, you’re stubborn like your mother, you have your mother’s hands.” One morning I looked at myself in the mirror and I recognised her: she was there, in my body. And to my surprise it began to bother me less and less; slowly I discovered her in my gestures, in a particular way of showing or controlling feelings, in my voice. If it was impossible to go back inside my mother, it was very possible that she had been inside me since birth, and that she could be found inside me even when I fought to escape her—even when I thought I was free of her.

Ever since I realised that finding myself meant finding her, and accepting and loving her the way I did as a child, I have felt soothed. Sometimes reconciliation is taken to be the capacity to forget the wrongs we’ve suffered. And maybe it’s true, but not in our relations with our mothers. I was reconciled with mine when I felt those wrongs—what seemed to me wrongs—as part of myself, essential for my development. So essential that they now appear an invention of mine, a brightly coloured exaggeration.

From "Incidental Inventions," out now from Europa Editions. All rights reserved.

Somehow, the holiday season is upon us again, and while we would normally eschew seasonal posts until at least Thanksgiving, we have to make an exception for our friends at Gallery1988. You see, the latest show at the pop culture-obsessed L.A. gallery is a solo outing for sculptor Blain Hefner, who has created a series of incredible Christmas tree toppers, inspired by some of our favorite movies (holiday-themed and otherwise). The show opened last Friday and every damn one of them has already sold out, but don't worry; we've got images of some of our favorites, and you can check out the rest over at G1988's site.

"Formaldehyde faces we have heard on high"

mixed media sculpture

11.25 x 10 inches

inspired by They Live

"STUUUUUUCK!"

mixed media sculpture

12 x 4 inches

inspired by A Christmas Story

"Another reason to hate Christmas"

mixed media sculpture

11 x 10.5 inches

inspired by Gremlins

"I wish for a big piano with Robert Loggia"

mixed media sculpture

11.25 x 10 inches

inspired by Big

"The topper was in danger of being crushed by an elf"

mixed media sculpture

8.5 x 8.5 inches

inspired by This Is Spinal Tap

"Large absent-minded spirit"

mixed media sculpture

10 x 7 inches

inspired by The Muppet Christmas Carol

"Last Christmas"

mixed media sculpture

12 x 4 inches

inspired by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

"Strange tidings are afoot at the Circle-K"

mixed media sculpture

11 x 3.5 inches

inspired by Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

"You guys give up or are you thirsty for more?"

mixed media sculpture

12 x 9 inches

inspired by Home Alone

"Consumers in Christ"

mixed media sculpture

13.25 x 4.25 inches

inspired by Brazil

Three lightweight but undeniably engaging late-summer releases are out this week on disc and demand, along with a welcome Blu-ray release (and Criterion Collection blessing) for one of last year’s best. All that and a stylish crime film worth another look on Netflix, as well as a giant collection of classic comedies from Shout Select. Let’s dig in:

ON NETFLIX:

Drive: At some point over the past few years, it stopped being cool to like Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 Ryan Gosling vehicle, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why; maybe it was the brutal reception of its follow-up, or Refn’s general (and continuing) divisiveness, or the peculiar choices Gosling made in its wake. Or maybe it was just too stylized, too brutal, or too easily punctured to go the distance anyway. But I’ll die on this hill: this is a bluntly effective piece of genre deconstruction, dazzlingly directed and loaded with superb performances. And yes, I’m still mad that Albert Brooks, cast magnificently against type as a ruthless crime boss, didn’t get that Oscar nomination.

ON BLU-RAY / AMAZON PRIME:

Cold War: Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski returns with another compact, visually austere, yet emotionally scorching picture, this time the devastating story of a teacher and student who meet in early ‘50s Poland, fall into some version of love (or at least lust), and spend the next several years basically ruining themselves for each other. It’s a wise movie – one that understands how absence can idealize a romance, and how it can curdle when that absence is resolved – and nimble too, covering a lot of story, over a long period, with a light touch. The first Amazon original to join the Criterion Collection, and a worthy addition at that. (Also streaming on Amazon Prime.) (Includes featurettes, interview, press conference, and trailer.)

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

The Peanut Butter Falcon: It sounds like the worst kind of (potentially exploitative) schmaltz: Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young man with Down’s Syndrome, slips away from his care facility, attaches himself to a sketchy fisherman (Shia LaBeouf), and heads upriver on a raft, Huck Finn-style, to train at the feet of his favorite pro wrestler (Thomas Haden Church). But writer/directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz assuage those fears early; they refuse to condescend to these characters, and fill their cast with the kind of no-nonsense characters actors (John Hawkes, Bruce Dern, Jon Bernthal) that can make any moment believable. And Dakota Johnson is staggeringly well-matched with LaBeauf, working up a specific, wonderful, zingy energy in their scenes together. It’s a lovely piece of work. (Includes featurette and trailer.)

Dora and the Lost City of Gold: The long-running Nickelodeon cartoon gets a live-action, big-screen adaptation, aged up and updated, to mostly effective comic effect, by director James Bobin (who helmed the 2011 Muppets movie and its sequel). It’s basically a pint-sized Indiana Jones picture, with generous helpings of The Goonies (and, at once point, a dash of Fitzcarraldo??) thrown in, so there are dangerous traps, brushes with death, and even a good old-fashioned quicksand sequence. While not a “You don’t even have to have a kid to see it,” mid-Pixar sort of affair, kids will love it (trust me), and parents who watch it with them will enjoy the in-jokes and little nudges, and will have a far better time than while suffering through, say, your average skull-crushing Illumination Entertainment nightmare. (Includes deleted and extended scenes, bloopers, and featurettes.)

Blinded by the Light: There’s a wonderful scene early in this ‘80s-era musical drama from director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) when Javed (Viveik Kalra) a British-Pakistani teen, hears the music of Bruce Springsteen for the first time. Chadha beautifully illustrates, in the way he listens and the lyrics that surround him, how music can seem to literally speak to you – how it grabs and holds you and keeps your for life. Blinded By the Light is full of moments like that, scenes of quiet truth and peeks into unknown worlds. It’s a touch draggy and plenty predictable (there is even, I swear to god, a late back-of-the-auditorium entrance), but it’s hard to poke holes in a movie this earnest and kind. (Includes deleted scenes and featurettes.)

ON BLU-RAY:

Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection: This is, for my money, most ambitious release to date from Shout! Factory’s stellar “Shout Select” imprint: a full HD upgrade of Uni’s must-have DVD collection, featuring a jaw-dropping 28 titles from A&C’s decade-and-a-half reign at the studio. As with so many of the classic comedy teams, the quality drops off noticeably towards the end (there aren’t many essentials past the deservedly beloved Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein), but that early run of ‘40s vehicles is tough to beat; their byplay and rhythm, honed over years on the burlesque stage and radio, resulted in a series of hip, snappy comedies that still deliver. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, trailers, and outtakes.)

In the new novel Big Bang (out this week in paperback from Little, Brown), author David Bowman peeks into the real-life history of America in the 1950s, cheerfully intermingling real events and figures with imaginary intersections, crafting an inquisitive and informative examination of the new, postwar normal.

We're pleased to present an excerpt from this exciting new work.

FROM "CHAPTER ONE: THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, MEXICO CITY, 1950":

Go back to 1950, thirteen years prior to Kennedy’s gundown in Dallas. Three young male American expatriates are living in Mexico City.

The word young is used with its 1950s implication. This is and was a decade when even men in their late thirties were considered young.

One of the men is thirty-two. On his deathbed many years after November 22, 1963, he will claim that he was part of the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. In 1950, this man brought his wife and their three-year-old daughter to this 5.2-square-mile capital built by the Aztecs in 1325. The Aztecs named it Tenochtitlán. The city had once been a Venice-like metropolis crisscrossed with canals as well as pyramids where the hearts of prisoners were ripped out from their chests. The Aztecs had faith this bloodletting kept the sun arcing across the sky.

This book’s eldest expatriate is thirty-six. He brought his common-law wife, his son, and his stepdaughter with him to Mexico City.

The youngest expatriate is twenty-seven. He brought only his wife, as they had no children. Each of these American men is unknown in 1950. The eldest will become a notorious modernist writer, his reputation greater than the number of actual readers who opened his books. The man whose age was in the middle will commit numerous political crimes, but will only be charged with a specific burglary that will force the resignation of an American president. The youngest of the three will become the enemy of this decade’s relentless fecundity, this Baby Big Bang—year after year in the 1950s nearly four million newborns pop up in suburban hospitals situated discreetly on the peripheries of clusters of cookie-cutter fake-colonial snout houses where each parent keeps a well-thumbed copy of Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care beside the bed.

This trio’s brief Mexican exile is a poignant lens to use to view the U.S.A. from.

—Norte America.

—Gringolandia.

* * *

The youngest expatriate is Carl Djerassi—pronounced Ger-AH-see. Djerassi looks a bitlike a Semitic Desi Arnaz. Djerassi arrives in Mexico City around Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Djerassi was born in Vienna when Sigmund Freud had still been alive. When he was sixteen, Carl’s parents sent him to New York City to escape Hitler’s imminent Blitzkrieg. Djerassi would attend college in Missouri and Ohio, finally earning a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. This man, who will exhibit a lifelong dedication to women and sex, and sex and women, was a carnal numbskull in college. He knew that possession of an automobile was the only way his generation could enjoy sex or a reasonably close facsimile, yet Djerassi never learned to drive. In fact, in Ohio, he took cello lessons instead of driving classes. At the start of the war, Djerassi was both a virgin and 4-F. He transcends that first affliction in 1943—his wedding night spent with his bride, Virginia, in a Pullman compartment clacking through the dark toward an Atlantic shore honeymoon.

Professionally, Djerassi would become a steroid man. ‘Steroids are solid alcohols that occur widely in plants and animals,’ he’d explain. ‘The best- known steroid is cholesterol.’ If you didn’t stop him, Djerassi would tell how all steroids (and all sterols) are based on a chemical skeleton that consists of carbon and hydrogen atoms arranged in four fused rings, generically known as ‘perhydrocyclopentanophenanthrene’—Djerassi always enunciating that boa constrictor word with smug fluidity.

Djerassi’s first job was working in New Jersey for a Swiss chemical company called CIBA. They held a patent for cholesterol, a steroid that was considered a good thing back then as cholesterol was a thinking man or woman’s steroid—10 percent of the brain is composed of cholesterol. Djerassi was part of the team that invented a powerful antihistamine for CIBA called pribenzamine. A chemical triumph. Djerassi was hot. He was recruited by a Mexico City pharmaceutical company called Syntex (from Synthesis and Mexico), led by Budapest-born chemist George Rosenkranz, who found himself exiled in Mexico after the war.

Djerassi’s New Jersey colleagues think he is crazy moving down to Mexico. Djerassi defends his decision: ‘Everyone assumes that serious chemistry stops at the Rio Grande. It doesn’t. I’m gambling that being in the backwater I can establish a scientific reputation.’ Then he speaks Latin, ‘Quod licet Iovinon licet bovi’ and translates, ‘What is allowed to God is not permitted to an ox.’

No one in New Jersey ever asks him what this means. Additionally, no one in New Jersey ever asks what his wife, Virginia, thinks about this Mexican relocation.

* * *

The gringo of the middle comparative age of thirty-two is an American spy named Howard Hunt. He is the head of the CIA office stationed in Mexico City. This town serves as the espionage portal to all of Central America. Spies are as numerous as drunks sleeping it off in city doorways and gutters.

Hunt works out of Uncle Sugar’s embassy in Mexico City. (Uncle Sugar = Uncle Sam = U.S.A.) It is a nondescript Latin moderne eighteen- story office building on the Reforma.

Hunt is a spy who could look good posing for a photo wearing an ascot. In the 3-D of real life, Hunt’s face has more than a few Bob Hope angles. This is the differencebetween a handsome man and a comedian. In addition, Hunt’s complexion is permanently pale as if he were some eternal Norwegian. Hunt even spent time in Hollywood and never tanned. In Mexico, he has remained relentlessly white. Hunt is a gringo’s gringo.

Often, his cover name is ‘Mr. White.’

Hunt’s spycraft is not assassination or molehood. He is an expert in Black Propaganda—forging reports or counterfeiting documents—stating something untrue, then planting fake spots in radio news or newspapers. Misinformation has always been as powerful as revealed secrets.

Hunt’s thirty-year-old wife, Dorothy, is also a spy. She was born Dorothy Wetzel in Ohio on an April Fools’ Day. After the Second World War, she worked for the OSS (progenitor of the CIA). She was adept at tracking down Nazi money and artwork for nineteenth-century-born William Averell Harriman. This man was the same Yale Bonesman Harriman who along with his cohort Prescott Bush had invested money for and with the Nazis in Berlin until FDR made such activities illegal. Dot’s travels for Harriman took her to Calcutta and New Delhi. She suffered a brief marriage to an alcoholic French count. She ended up stationed in Shanghai. There, she met E. Howard Hunt, also of the OSS.

Excerpted from the book "Big Bang" by David Bowman. Copyright © 2019 by David Bowman. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

On October 2, 1950, a little comic strip debuted in seven newspapers and proceeded, in the years that followed, to change the form - and, in its own small way, the world.

Charles Schultz's "Peanuts" turns 70 next year, and the celebration is begining in Austin, Texas this weekend. Tonight, Mondo Gallery opens "It's An Art Show, Charlie Brown," which reproduces sixteen iconic "Peanuts" panels and cartoons (via screenprints by Lady Lazarus Press). These moments elegantly articulate part of what makes the strip so timeless: a sense of existential ennui, which makes them particularly poignant in these nerve-racking times.

We're pleased to share some of our favorites (five of them exclusive to Flavorwire); keep an eye on Mondo's site if you'd like to pick one up for yourself.

Peanuts "Empty" (Flavorwire Exclusive)

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

18" x 22" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 100

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Go Home" (Flavorwire Exclusive)

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

18" x 24" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 125

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Can't Stand It" (Flavorwire Exclusive)

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

18" x 24" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 125

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Doomed" (Flavorwire Exclusive)

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

19" x 18" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 125

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Musicians" (Flavorwire Exclusive)

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

24" x 16.5" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 125

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Hide"

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

16" x 24" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 100

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts "Ice Cream"

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

18" x 21" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 100

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

Peanuts “Masks”

Featuring artwork by Charles Schulz

24" x 16.5" Screenprinted Poster

Edition of 100

Printed by Lady Lazarus Press

$45

One of the most elemental but essential functions of photography is to cast things in a new light - to help us see people, places, and things in unexpected ways. This is the explicit purpose of "A Glitch in the System, deconstructing stereotypes," a new exhibition in the Photo Vogue Festival, which collects and presents the works of thirty photographers. These photos present, per the press release, "new ways of looking at gender fluidity, at the diverse wealth of body types and appearances and at the endless forms of beauty, of ethnic backgrounds and origin," which "are changing contemporary aesthetic standards and beginning to alter cultural and identity codes in terms of openness, dialogue and encounter."

The exhibition is on display through November 17 at the Photo Vogue Festival in Milan, but if you won't be in Italy over the weekend, don't worry; we've plucked out a few of our favorites below.

'Prom Boy,' Caleb Stein

'La Femme A La Papaye,' Namsa Leuba

'Shoulder (Drown in my magic),' David Uzochukwu

'Opulence,' Dustin Thierry

'Portrait in the Kitchen,' Mariya Kozhanova

'Sanamacha and Menka,' Prarthna Singh

'A Glitch in the World,' David PD Hyde

Untitled, Mous Lamrabat

"A Glitch in the System" is on display through November 17 at the Photo Vogue Festival in Milan; more photos and information here.

And, like that, it’s all there. Tuesday brought the launch of Disney+, the cultural behemoth’s long-promised, much-hyped streaming service – delivering, well, most of the feature films, TV movies, and shows from the company’s decades-long reign. They’ve got your Bambi and your Cinderella, your Snow White and Little Mermaid, your Iron Man and your Star Wars. And though there are a few noteworthy exclusions (some due to existing deals, some due to shifts in cultural sensitivity, some inexplicable), the “here’s everything!” nature of the Disney+ dump, as underscored by the massive Twitter thread last month that unveiled the full scope of the streaming library, seems admirable (even aspirational) in the current streaming environment.

Take, as your counterpoint, next spring’s HBOMax, which will reportedly include a “curated classics collection” of, rumor has it, about 1800 movies – many of them not exactly hard to find. Considering the thousands of movies readily available to the AT&T-owned service (the vast libraries of Warner Brothers, MGM, RKO, and others, much of which disappeared when the communications giant unceremoniously pulled the plug on FilmStruck last year), that’s a shameful pittance.

Those full libraries, were they to be made available, would tell an entire story about the history of Hollywood. And to be sure, the Disney+ library tells a story, too. In fact, it tells many different stories, to many different people.

The titles they want you to talk about – the ones spotlighted in the press around the service, the ones that got the most RTs and QTs in that October data dump – are the classics, the marquee titles, the films we think of when we think of Disney. The specific movie that means may vary with age; a tech-savvy boomer may look forward to sharing the animated classics of their youth with the grandkids, while a contemporary kid begging their parents to add it on may go straight to the Marvel or Star Wars properties.

But the movies that caught my eye, as a child of the video store era, were the ones everyone’s forgotten about. The ‘70s Don Knotts and Dean Jones vehicles, the ‘90s Disney Channel originals, the 2000s direct-to-video sequels – these all lined our shelves at Blockbuster and Hollywood, perched eagerly to serve the same purpose as the various forgotten animal features and westerns of the '50s and ‘60s. They were babysitters, fodder for exhausted parents to snooze through during Saturday matinees at the local cinema, or lazy Sunday mornings in front of the television.

And Disney+ is, in a way, the purest realization of this element of the company’s profile. When it started in the 1920s, every release from Walt Disney Productions was hand-crafted, formulated by the studio’s namesake; once they began making feature films in the late 1930s, they still only released one to two films per year. But as the decades passed, Disney adopted a Henry Ford-style assembly-line method of production, similar to the other movie studios of the time – and have maintained it long after the end of the so-called “studio era.” To put it in the most contemporary of terms, Disney is and always has been a content factory, ruthlessly and consciously applying proven formulas to all of its product. That’s why the story beats in the animated features have barely varied over something like eighty years; it’s why so many of the live-action programmers are virtually indistinguishable; it’s why it was so easy for the studio to churn out remake/sequels to their biggest hits, for pennies on the dollar.

No one has been mass-producing content for as long as Disney has, nor as efficiently. And that, it seems safe to bet, is why they’re the first real threat we’ve seen to Netflix’s domination in the streaming sphere.

Few names in modern publishing are as widely recognized as Dean Koontz, whose novels have sold over 500 million copies to date in 38 languages. Fourteen of his novels have topped the New York Times best-seller list. And now, at 74, he's embarking on a new publishing venture: a multi-book deal with Amazon Publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer, as well as a new collection of six short thrillers, Nameless, out this week from Amazon Publishing imprint Amazon Original Stories.

Next up is Devoted, "an epic thriller about a golden retriever, a boy named Woody, his mother Megan, and their extended family as they confront a terrifying threat to all humanity." It won't hit shelves and Kindles until next March, but good news: we've got an exclusive excerpt to share, which introduces the story's antagonist, Lee Shacket. Desperate and vicious, Shacket is fleeing Utah with a million dollars cash, after blowing up a research facility owned by his company, Refine. Something went very, very wrong in those laboratories; he's trying to get away before anyone figures out what, and cover his own tracks in the process.

Check out the exclusive excerpt, along with an animated book cover reveal, below; you can pre-order Devoted on Amazon now.

FROM DEVOTED:

The two-lane blacktop is a dark snake slithering through the moon-washed paleness of the Utah wastelands. In the nearly empty vastness, small clusters of lights glimmer here and there in the distance, like extraterrestrial pod craft that have descended from the mother ship on some nefarious mission.

Traveling south out of the Provo suburbs into ever greater isolation, Lee Shacket dares not take Interstate 15. He uses less-busy state highways, undivided federal highways when he must, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the events at the Springville facility.

If he has committed as much evil as any man in history, he has done it with the best intentions. He believes that those intentions matter more than the consequences of his actions. How could humanity have advanced from caves to orbiting space stations if all men and women were risk averse? Some seek knowledge and rise to challenges at whatever cost, and because of them, progress is made.

Anyway, all may be well in the end. The final result of the project is not yet known, only that it’s gone wrong in mid stage. Every scientific endeavor is marked by setbacks. Ultimately, failure can be the father of success if one learns from the errors made.

Initially, however, he is treating this failure as absolute.

He is driving neither his Tesla nor his Mercedes 550SL, because eventually the authorities will be looking for him. He is tooling along in a fully loaded blood-red Dodge Demon that he purchased for $146,000 through an LLC based in the Cayman islands, to which his name can’t be linked even by the most determined investigator. The vehicle bears a Montana license plate. In the unlikely event that a connection between him and the car might be made by law enforcement, the GPS has been removed from the Dodge to prevent its location from being discovered by satellite.

One of two suitcases in the trunk contains $100,000. Another $300,000 in hundred-dollar bills can be accessed by disengaging two pressure latches on the back of the front passenger seat, revealing a secret compartment. Sewn into the lining of his supple black leather jacket, which is cut like a sport coat, are thirty-six high- quality diamonds worth half a million to any gem wholesaler.

These assets are not intended to support him for the rest of his life. They are to be used to allow him to go to ground for a few months, until the furor over the Springville fiasco subsides, make his way out of the United States, and get safely to Costa Rica by an indirect route involving five countries and three identity changes.

In Costa Rica, he owns a retreat under the name Ian Stonebridge, and he possesses a valid Swiss passport in that identity.

He is the CEO of Refine, a multibillion-dollar division of a mega-valued conglomerate. Few CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies have the foresight to imagine a corporate crisis dire enough to require the preparation of a new identity and the hiding away of sufficient capital overseas to sustain a high standard of living for decades to come. Shacket takes pride in the fact that he has been wise and prudent for a man so much younger than most other CEOs.

He is thirty-four, which isn’t all that young for a guy in his position in an economic sector where companies have been founded by technology wizards who became billionaires in their twenties. He answers to the chairman of the board of the parent company, Dorian Purcell, who was a billionaire at twenty-seven and is now thirty- eight, but Shacket himself is worth only a hundred million.

Dorian wanted the research at Springville to proceed at a breakneck pace. Shacket obliged because, were they to succeed in their primary project, stock options would make him a billionaire, too, although probably not a multibillionaire, while Dorian’s fifty- billion-dollar fortune would most likely double.

The injustice of this unequal compensation causes Shacket to grind his teeth in his sleep; he often wakes with aching jaws. A mere billionaire is a nobody among the princes of high tech. In spite of their pretensions to social equality, many of this crowd are among the most class-conscious elite bigots the world has ever known. Lee Shacket despises them almost as much as he wants to be one of them.

If he has to go into hiding for the rest of his life with only a measly hundred million to sustain himself, he will have a lot of free time in which to plot the ruination of Purcell and little or no inclination to do anything else.

From the start, Lee Shacket has understood that, should something go very wrong, he will have to take the fall. Dorian Purcell will forever remain untouchable, an icon of the high-tech revolution. Nevertheless, now that Shacket is having to pay that price, he feels deceived, tricked, bamboozled.

Driving through the early night, he is racked by anger and by self-pity and anxiety, but also by what he believes to be grief, an emotion that is new to him. Ninety-two Refine employees are in the locked-down high-security facility near Springville, prevented from communicating with the outside world, in their final hours of life.

He’s as pissed off at them as at Dorian. One of those geniuses——or several——has done something careless that sealed their fate and put him in this untenable position. Yet some are his friends, to the extent that a CEO can allow himself friends among those he must supervise, and their suffering, as it should, distresses him.

During the building of that complex, he’d taken pains to ensure that the module containing his office and those of his immediate support staff——five others——would go into airtight lockdown ninety seconds after all of the labs were hermetically sealed in a crisis. When the alarm sounded, he assured his staff that they were safe, that they should stay at their posts——and he quietly departed.

He had no choice but to lie to them. The alarm didn’t announce impending disaster, but an immediate one. They are as contaminated as the researchers in the labs. Shacket is likewise contaminated, but in mortal circumstances like these, he isn’t capable of lying to himself as easily as he lied to them.

Anyway, he’s always been clever about eluding the consequences of his mistakes. Maybe his luck will hold through one last escape.

He’ll soon be hunted, the quarry of legitimate authorities but also of Dorian’s ruthless clean-up crew. He hopes, in what he believes is a spirit of mercy and sorrow, that all employees at Springville will perish before any can bear witness against him.

Excerpted from "Devoted" by Dean Koontz with permission from the publisher, Thomas & Mercer. Copyright © 2020 by The Koontz Living Trust. All rights reserved.

Two summer sleepers hit disc this week, and both are worth your time. And that’s not all – we’ve got two must-see indies, a new release of an animated classic, an unsung ‘90s gem from Criterion, and a triple feature of ace ‘70s crime movies from KL Studio Classics.

ON NETFLIX:

Burning Cane: Writer/director Phillip Youmans was all of 17 years old when he made this haunting, disturbing, and unforgettable story of lives in disarray in the contemporary South. He tells a trio of stories simultaneously, their connections seeming tenuous, but pulls the threads together in the closing passages with unexpected force. Until then, he fills his film with evocative landscapes and vernacular speech, and scene of quiet intensity and oh-no anticipation. As the country preacher at the film’s shaky moral center, Wendell Pierce is soulful and sweaty and absolutely believable; I feel like he’s been in that church for decades. But the whole movie is like that – entrenched in its specific time and place, and afire with that authenticity.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

One Child Nation: China’s One-Child Policy, a 35-year decree that families were only allowed a single offspring, was pushed by amusing propaganda and reiterated in terrifying, threatening banners. But it wasn’t a simple family planning issue, as this eye-opening first person documentary from directors Nanfu Wang (Hooligan Sparow) and Zhang Lynn. It left a legacy of abduction, human trafficking, forced sterilization and abortion, and on and on; the horror stories and images they capture are hard to hear. But they’re vital and necessary; this is an upsetting film, but a must-see.

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

Good Boys: Universal’s advertising for this summer comedy leaned hard on the presence of producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and for good reason; it is, beat for beat, a tween remix of their Superbad script. The horny buddies at the center are, this time, heading into middle school, invited to their first “kissing party,” and unsure what to do with that information; their one long night of misadventures culminates with that big party, and with some realizations about who they are. To their credit, screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (the latter directed) go a step further, and the epilogue is surprisingly affecting. It’s lightweight fare – not a moment too short at 89 minutes – and Eisenberg and Stupnitsky pull off the impressive balancing act of creating a comedy that’s somehow both absolutely filthy and totally innocent. (Includes audio commentary, alternate ending, deleted and extended scenes, gag reel, and featurettes.)

The Farewell: This seriocomic drama from writer/director Lulu Wang is, the opening credits assure us, “based on an actual lie.” The lie: that rather than tell aging grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou) that she had stage four cancer, her family will all come home to China for a wedding, and that’s when they’ll say their goodbyes. “It’s a good lie,” the doctor insists, but a tough one for Billi (Akwafina), the only granddaughter, who’s always had a relationship of closeness and candor with Nai Nai. The expected familial tensions and personal heartaches rear their heads, but thanks to Wang’s naturalistic approach and terrific eye (her compositions are stirking and summoning), it never feels like formula. And Awka crafts a marvelous, restrained performance, finding just the right notes for this woman who comes to understand that this journey isn’t just about her grandmother. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, and featurette.)

ON BLU-RAY / AMAZON PRIME:

Winter Kills: The 1970s were a golden age for conspiracy thrillers, thanks to classics like The Conversation, The Parallax View, Klute, and Blow-Out (a little late in 1981, but in the spirit nevertheless). But the wildest of the bunch may well have been this 1979 adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel, riffing on the Kennedy assassination and the legends surrounding it; Jeff Bridges (playing the curious half-brother of the JFK surrogate) leads a giant, gonzo ensemble that includes John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Toshiro Mifune, and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor. It doesn’t have the tautness of its conspiracy picture brethren, but that’s part of its charm; it’s an unruly piece of work, ruled by dream logic and urban legends. (Also streaming on Prime Video.) (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, radio spot, and trailer.)

ON BLU-RAY:

The Daytrippers: Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) made his feature debut with this micro-budget indie comedy/drama – new to the Criterion Collection - in which a suburban wife (the marvelous Hope Davis) discovers what she thinks is a love letter to her husband (Stanley Tucci, perfection) and heads off into “the city” to confront him, with her entire family in tow. These are the makings of a broad comedy, and it sometimes tiptoes in that direction (particularly in Anne Meara’s performance, though she’s awfully funny). But Mottola’s working in a melancholy key here, telling a subtler story about the inevitability of change, and the simultaneous reliability and irritation of family. Every performance works, though Parker Posey is especially good in perhaps the film’s trickiest role. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, and short film.)

Spirited Away: Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 fantasy classic gets the deluxe edition treatment from GKids and Shout! Factory, and it remains a marvel – an Alice in Wonderland riff that takes its young heroine down a rabbit hole of surrealist situations and grotesque characters. The imagery is inventive and nightmarish, the storytelling rapturous, the voice work compelling. But if anything has grown with the passage of time, it’s the effectiveness of the hand-drawn animation; each cell is like a painting, each sequence a snapshot of a wondrous world. (Includes featurettes, storyboards, trailers, and soundtrack CD.)

Charley Varrick: There was a wonderful moment in the early 1970s where the star system was so wide open that Walter Matthau, the master of hangdog comedy, was able to reposition himself as a leading man in action movies. KL Studio Classics has already released the first (The Laughing Policeman) and last (The Taking of Pelham 123) of those films; now, thankfully, they’re completing the trilogy with the film that came between them, this 1973 thriller from the great Don Siegel (Dirty Harry). Matthau plays a small-time bank robber who inadvertently hits a Mafia drop-off – and he’s our hero, which means the villains (including John Vernon’s bank president and Joe Don Baker’s mob enforcer) have to be especially sleazy. It’s a nasty piece of work, directed with Siegel’s customary ruthless efficiency. (Includes audio commentary, documentary, featurette, and trailers.)

Madigan: Siegel also helmed this New York cop movie, released in 1968 but dealing in issues that haven’t exactly left the NPYD (corruption, police brutality, the works). It shakes out about as you’d expect, considering the time period, though the screenplay (by Howard Rodman and Hollywood Ten member Abe Polonsky, whose Force of Evil was an influential NYC noir) handles its story with admirable complexity. And Siegel nicely captures the look and feel of the New York locations; this was among the first batch of movies shot under the city’s mid-1960s initiative to streamline film production in Gotham. Richard Windmark is as sturdy as ever in the title role, though Henry Fonda makes the deepest impression as the city’s conflicted police commissioner. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)

Though the Surrealist movement is over a hundred years old, the aesthetics and ideas that so invigorated its creators remain strikingly relevant to contemporary artists. Eleven such artists - working in the media of painting, sculpture, and installation - gather for Booth Gallery's new exhibition Not All Doors Are the Same, and though not all eleven self-identify as Surrealist, each uses some variation on the primary themes of Surrealism, and traffic in the same kind of disturbing imagery and haunted beauty.

We've selected a few highlights from the show; Not All Doors Are The Same is on view through December 7th at Booth Gallery in New York City.

Ronit Baranga

My Artemis (On the Wall), 2019

Clay, Acrylic Paint

Miles Johnston

Wounded, 2019

Graphite on Natural Stonehenge Paper

Dasha Shishkin

Excitement, Trout, in The Public Trousers, 2018

Charcoal, acrylic on myla

Adam Miller

The Fall Of Troy, 2019

Oil on Linen

Rob Zeller

The Courtship, 2019

Oil on Linen

Inka Essenhigh

Power Plant, 2016

Enamel on Panel

Jamie Adams

Blondie Bubba and His Rainbow World, 2018

Oil on Linen

Martin Wittfooth

The Moon, 2019

Oil on Canvas

Since the fortune reaped by George Lucas following the release of Star Wars, the official action figure has become a standby of any commercial-friendly blockbuster movie or television show, launching entire subsets of geekdom (and lucrative revenue streams for those with the discipline to keep them in the original packaging). But what if those toys weren't just the providence of the biggest IPs around? What if there were also action figures for slightly more... obscure offerings?

A few juicy possibilities are offered up by visual artist Dano Brown, whose pieces are the highlight of Gallery1988's current "Pop-Cuture Sculptures" show. We've picked out some of our favorites; you can check out the entire show, and even purchase the few remaining figures, here.

See all of Brown's figures, and the rest of the "Pop-Culture Sculptures" exhibit, at Gallery1988 - located at 7308 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

In retrospect, my first mistake was probably re-watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining the night before my press screening of Doctor Sleep, Mike Flanagan’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s follow-up novel. I was explicitly encouraged to by the film’s ad campaign – the tagline is “Dare to go back” – but doing so did little but underscore the fundamental impossibility of Flanagan’s task. Mr. King famously loathed Kubrick’s interpretation of his story, complaining about it to anyone who’d listen, penning a more faithful do-over for television in 1997, then attempting to take back his own narrative when Doctor Sleep was published in 2013.

The problem, of course, is that a great many people other than Stephen King like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining very much – including, apparently, Mr. Flanagan. And thus he attempts to make both a faithful adaptation of King’s new book and a direct descendant of Kubrick’s film, full of musical lifts, visual quotations, and even reenactments of key moments from the original. But the two works are fundamentally incompatible, and in trying to accomplish both feats, Doctor Sleep does neither one successfully.

In fact, the end result feels like one of those behind-the-scenes stories you occasionally hear about existing scripts that are hastily rewritten into sequels of hot properties (like how the unrelated Simon Says became Die Hard With a Vengeance). The bulk of Doctor Sleep concerns a cult of telepaths, led by “Rose the Hat” (Rebecca Ferguson), who move like travelers, settling into camps and living out of RVs, maintaining their youth by drinking in the “steam” of the young telepaths they murder. They keep the “steam” in canisters, and pop one open whenever one of them is getting a little too mortal.

Let’s just come out and say it: though there are some genuinely disturbing sequences in this thread, the "steam thieves" stuff is pretty goofy. It feels, at risk of putting too fine a point on it, like late King, miles removed from the domestic drama, bottled madness, and middle-of-nowhere claustrophobia that made The Shining – both the novel and the movie – so effective. And while it’s always tricky to guess at the tastes of the dearly departed, it seems safe to bet that Kubrick would’ve loathed all of this immortal-supernatural-monster mess, particularly when it veers into Walking Dead territory in the third act (including, swear to God, a shoot-out).

So how does all this tie into The Shining? Well, you see, we’re also following little Danny Torrance; after an ill-conceived early section, set in the immediate aftermath of The Shining, we meet up with adult “Dan” (played, reasonably well, by Ewan McGregor), who has turned into an alcoholic, dirtbag drifter. He eventually settles down, finds a job, gets clean, and goes to meetings. A few years later, he develops a psychic connection with Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran, very good), whose “shine” is strong enough to attract the attention of Rose and her crew.

All of this leads, by what could politely be described as strained plotting, to a climax at the old Overlook. Throughout the picture, Flanagan freely quotes from Kubrick, from shot composition to props to even a job interview scene staged exactly like the job interview from The Shining, down to the tiny flag and nameplate on the desk. It’s impressive, I guess, but why is it there? (The best I can guess is so we can all nudge each other and whisper, “That’s just like in the original.”) But all of those little flourishes are a mere warm-up for the climax, in which characters wander through the Overlook for no clearer purpose than to allow Flanagan to quote-tweet iconic moments, and we can all nod in recognition and remember, yep, that sure was something in the original. There’s sadly little daylight between this sequence and the Shining stretch of the loathsome Ready Player One; the only difference is that at least RPO acknowledges that it's cosplay.

The two scenes in genuine conversation with the original movie – one at an AA meeting, one at the Overlook – make it crushingly clear how inherently irreconcilable these narratives are. We’ve suddenly shifted into a completely different movie, and watching Flanagan attempt to pivot between them is like sitting on the sofa, trying to watch TV while your partner is channel surfing.

"Doctor Sleep" is out tomorrow.

Practically since its advent, fashion and art photography has been dominated by the male gaze - with women presented, and often objectified, by male photographers, and seen only as vessels for their pleasure and desire. But in recent years, a new generation of female photographers are changing that, using their photography (in galleries, in books, and on social media) to transform how women are seen, literally and figuratively.

In the new book Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze (out now from Laurence King Publishing), author Charlotte Jansen spotlights the work of forty artists, all of whose principal subject matter is either themselves or other women, along with interviews and commentary on their work and this important shift in the medium. We're pleased to present this excerpt from her introduction.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "LEARNING TO LOOK AT WOMEN"

On my computer screen is a half-naked young woman. The flawless, golden brown skin of her back is decorated with a cornucopia of tiny, sparkly stickers of rainbows, stars, kisses, dolphins, butterflies. Simple cotton underwear – powder pink to match the bed sheets she lies on – clasps to the cheeks of her bottom. Across the knickers a single word is printed in pink: ‘Feminist’.

This photograph (by Mayan Toledano) made me angry. It would pop up again and again in my field of vision and everywhere from The New York Times to Tumblr. If you’ve used the internet in the last two years, the chances are it will be familiar to you too, and perhaps you had the same gut reaction to it as me. At the same time, it was making a huge impact. It seemed to capture the cultural predicament of the age of the female gaze: how should we look at women?

There is a fundamental pleasure in looking at women that is undeniable and unavoidable and tends to complicate the central place women have in visual culture. In the past, photographs of women were made by men for a capitalist economy to favour the male gaze and feed female competitiveness. Female visibility is therefore a fallacy: we see photographs of women every day, but we are used to looking at them in a few specific contexts: on products and billboards, in shop windows and magazine covers, in erotica and pornography. They appear similarly online, in the thick and fast slew of the trillion photographs we collectively produce and share every year. Yet photographs of women are far more provocative and complicated than these viewing circumstances prescribe.

Over the last five years, however, a growing number of the photographs of women we look at on a daily basis are being produced by women. The fact that women are taking more photographs of women – both themselves and others – than ever before is something that deserves attention. Does it matter whether Toledano’s image was shot by a man or a woman? I believe it does. When I started this book, two years ago, I was motivated not by the idea of ‘female photography’ (there is no such thing) but by the way in which the mainstream media was describing this unprecedented phenomenon of female photographers who photograph women. The dominant rhetoric gives us a narrow idea of why and how women photograph women – and what they have to offer.

The very particular place of the photograph of a woman in contemporary culture means we scarcely pause to take a second or prolonged look, but swipe swiftly on. This unequal treatment of photographs of women unfortunately connects to a wider gender inequality that affects every single country in the world. If we aren’t able to see more than an expression of feminism or femininity in a photograph of a female figure, how can we expect to see more than this when we encounter women elsewhere?

My project is pro-women, but that of the artists featured in this book isn’t necessarily. I wanted to embrace all kinds of photographs of women by women to bring them together – not to show how they are similar but to present how photographs of women are not always about feminism and femininity (although some, of course, are). We are so used to seeing images now in juxtaposition, that all photographs of women – static and silent – even when they’re made for different purposes and audiences, are forced into a dialogue with one another. A selfie by Kim Kardashian proliferates so widely that we understand any photographic self-portrait through her lens. We see photographs women take – even of other women – as narcissistic, shallow, easy. This confluence of meanings doesn’t benefit photographers or viewers. We often miss the nuances that reflect, in varying degrees, the photographer’s perspective of living in our times – that doesn’t only concern women.

Why is there a need to highlight only female photographers, if the aim is to come to photographs of women neutrally, without drawing attention to the gender of their maker? Given the long-established bias of the hetero-patriarchy, we still have centuries to go before the balance is redressed. At times, there seems to be little difference between how women photograph women and how men photograph women, but women have the right to self-objectify and to exploit without critique, just as men have been allowed to do since the earliest forms of art emerged. I came to see the feminist knickers as the beginning of an imperfect but very important process of emancipation.

Photographs taken by women do not only exist as a counterpoint to the male narrative. A photograph is an impulse – and challenge – to enquire, not a representation of truth. More often than not, I find that the photographs of women by women I see point me back to my own prejudice and misconceptions. Thanks to the generosity of the photographers on these pages, I had the chance to question my viewing habits and dig below the spectacle of surface.

In the hours I spent interviewing the 40 artists from 17 countries, I was often surprised by the reasons for which women photograph women. They can be a way to understand identity, femininity, sexuality, beauty and bodies. At times, using the female body is only a means to an end: it’s a material that is available, over which the photographer-model has total ownership and final sovereignty. The photographs women take of women can be a tool for challenging perceptions in the media, human rights, history, politics, aesthetics, technology, economy and ecology; to get at the unseen structures in our world and contribute to a broader understanding of society. What you can get is not always what you might see.

Girl on Girl – as the title suggests – is ultimately a mediation on the agency women are taking over the images that are made of them. It’s an investigation into the use and meaning of female photography now, bringing to light the plurality of situations in which a photograph is created and seen. The more we’re exposed to different types of photographs of women – more women than we will ever meet in real life – the more we can learn. ‘No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male’, wrote the most radical feminist writer, Valerie Solanas. It would be naive to think that photographs of women can change the world, but we can learn a lot by looking.

Excerpted from "Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze" by Charlotte Jansen. Copyright © 2019 by Charlotte Jansen. Excerpted by permission of Laurence King Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

It’s a real dud week on disc – aside from our marquee title, the big new releases are Hobbs & Shaw, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and The Kitchen – so we’re dipping deep in to the streaming services, which have added a number of tasty titles at the top of the month. Here we go:

ON NETFLIX:

Rounders: This 1998 poker drama is a classic example of a cinematic slow starter; it did little business on its initial release, but within a couple of years, the explosion of recreational Texas Hold-‘Em play (the picture’s primary card game) made the film a belated hit on home video. This tale of a reformed card player (Matt Damon) and his eternal screw-up of a buddy and partner (Edward Norton) feels written from the inside — there’s lingo, and lots of it, convincingly mouthed by the strong ensemble cast, and the picture have a good ear for the kind of street poetry rhythms found in David Mamet’s best work (“But about the money, I gotta say this: I gotta say no”). The direction, by the great and underrated John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction), is moody and atmospheric; the smoke in the poker rooms is thick enough to smell. Some of the supporting characters are thin (and yes, Malkovich’s accent is ridiculous), but this brisk melodrama is fast-paced fun, and prime for repeat viewing.

Rosemary’s Baby: Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic is a rather miraculous high-wire act of diversion and misinformation; if you go into it cold (which, I know, is impossible these days), you’d be surprised by the way the screenwriter/director keeps its bombshell from the audience until the last possible moment. He spends his first two hours building up an atmosphere of unexplained haziness, fear and dread, leaving us uncertain of what, exactly, is wrong with Rosemary’s firstborn—until we find out. Oh boy, do we find out.

Super Fly: Presumably due to the recent addition of the Netflix original Dolemite is My Name, the services has added a handful of vintage blaxpoitation movies, and this is probably the best – worth watching in tandem with Dolemite because of its scrappy, Scotch-taped aesthetic, betraying a hustler’s spirit and run-and-gun style that’s influenced many a low-budget filmmaker. Some of the staging is clumsy and (aside from star Ron O’Neal) the acting is amateurish. But there’s real power here, particularly when director Gordon Parks Jr. – whose father, the influential photographer, directed the film’s contemporary, Shaft – just lets the music and images tell the story (literally, in Curtis Mayfield’s astute, and famously counter-narrative, lyrics). And that ending sure is a crowd-pleaser.

ON AMAZON PRIME:

Chinatown: Nothing is ever quite as it seems (or so goes the cliché) in classic noir detective movies: the client is lying, their motives are sketchy, and the initially simple mystery gradually reveals itself to be something much bigger and more sinister. Robert Towne’s justifiably celebrated screenplay follows the playbook, but takes advantage of the freedoms of New Hollywood and the R rating to throw his mystery a twist that couldn’t have flown in the Bogart era. It’s a movie that somehow maintains its power to shock — and to thrill. (Also streaming on Hulu.)

Juice: There was an extraordinary moment, in the early 1990s, when films not only about but by African-Americans were both critically lauded and commercially successful, and in the wake of hits like New Jack City and Boyz N The Hood, major studios were willing (for once, and just briefly) to take risks on filmmakers of color. Sure, they were almost exclusively interested in similar stories of guns and crime, but some directors managed to subtly shade within those lines. Chief among them was Ernest R. Dickerson, Spike Lee’s longtime cinematographer (he shot Lee’s first six features) who made his directorial debut with this 1992 hit, turning the story of four friends from Harlem who turn on each other into something akin to a Warner Brothers gangster movie with a film noir edge. Helping matters considerably was Dickerson’s sharp eye for young talent, with a cast that includes early spotlight roles for Omar Epps, Queen Latifah, and an electrifying young actor named Tupac Shakur.

ON HULU:

The Nightingale: The latest from director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) is an unremittingly bleak and brutal work, full of horrifying images and a particular scene of violence and terror so ugly and haunting, it’s hard to recommend the picture at all. But if you can withstand that, there’s no questioning the skill and craft Kent displays here; she tells the story of a young woman’s quest for revenge from a uniquely feminine perspective, placing her squarely in a world where every look and aside is a threat, even before those threats are carried out. Some of the flourishes are heavy-handed, and a key decision by the protagonist is left frustratingly unexplained and ill-defined. But there are scenes of real power here, and a lead performance by Aisling Franciosi that is impossible to shake.

Meeting Gorbachev: “I am a German,” Werner Herzog informs Mikhail Gorbachev at the beginning of their first interview. “And the first German you ever met probably wanted to kill you.” And thus, we’re off and running in Herzog and André Singer’s documentary profile of the last leader of the USSR, combining footage from their three conversations with archival footage and commentary by observers on the political scene. For those of us with terrible public school world history educations, it’s a detailed and informative recap of the dismantling of the Soviet Union – not, as so many documentaries would tell you, the result of a couple of events and sound bytes, but a collection of intersecting independence movements. And it’s a compelling piece of portraiture, clearly done from a place of admiration and respect.

ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: One of the more puzzling mysteries of the home media calendar is Lionsgate’s decision to release this one on the Tuesday after Halloween – it even starts on that holiday, with a good prank going bad as its inciting action. Nevertheless, if you’re up for one more creature feature, it’s a good one, as director André Øvredal and a team of screenwriters turn Alvin Schwartz’s classic series of horror short stories into a surprisingly robust single narrative with a juicy central premise: a haunted book, which “reads” our teen protagonists, describing their grisly demises as they play out. The kills are intricate and ingenious, something akin to a teen Final Destination, and the PG-13 rating is a real one; some of these sequences are way too intense for younger audiences. They might’ve even put a scare or two into this old-ass man. (Includes featurettes.)

ON BLU-RAY

Naked Alibi: #Noirvember – that annual old-movie buff tradition in which we flip from stuffing horror movies into our eyes all October to stuffing films noir into our eyeballs all November – is underway, and KL Studio Classics was kind enough to provide this shiny new Blu-ray edition of Jerry Hopper’s 1954 thriller for the occasion. It stars two of the form’s mainstays, Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame, and plays now like a proto-Touch of Evil (which came out four years later); it’s a sweaty, border-town noir, flush with atmosphere and desire. Gene Barry chews the scenery as a crazed, cackling cop killer on the lamb, Hayden is the tough detective on his trail, and Grahame is the tough broad who first loves one, then the other. She’s as bad-girl seductive as ever, and Hayden juices up his conventional good-guy role with his weathered, rough-and-tumble gravitas. (Includes audio commentary and trailers.)

“In New York, you are constantly faced with this very urgent, quick decision that you have to make about every 20 minutes," David Cross once explained. "About every 20 minutes, immediately, you have to go, [gasp] 'Oh my God. Do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world?'" That constant parade of diversions and fascinations, the little show that makes walking the streets of New York City such a treat, is also at the center of Coincidences, a series from street photographer Jonathan Higbee, collected in a new book of the same name (out this week from Anthology Editions).

Higbee's images captures surprising, witty, and unexpected juxtapositions on the streets and subways - moments when two divergent figures or objects intersect, creating a fleeting story in the frame. "When I moved to New York, I was completely overwhelmed, overstimulated, and anxious," Higbee says. "I used the camera to distill the chaos and overwhelming nature of New York into something that I could understand and process."

Here are a few of our favorites:

All photos © Jonathan Higbee from the book Coincidences published by Anthology Editions.

To see more, and pick up a copy, New Yorkers can come to the Coincidences book release and reception at the Aperture Bookstore (547 W. 27th Street, 4th Floor) on Tuesday, November 5 at 6:30pm.

We’re closing in on the end of the year, and this month’s indie offerings are about what you’d expect: a lot (and I mean a lot) of documentaries, a couple of obscurities, a few high-profile titles with awards aspirations, and plenty of Adam Driver. It’s a hell of a crop, featuring some of the best films your correspondent has seen this year, so mark up that calendar:

In her scorching new memoir Ordinary Girls (out now from Algonquin Books), author Jaquira Diaz takes on the coming-of-age story from her unique, queer Puerto Rican perspective - tackling racial and sexual identity, domestic abuse, poverty, mental health, drug abuse, suicide, and much more.

We're pleased to present an excerpt from this important work.

FROM "ORDINARY GIRLS"

The first time she saw my father, my mother knew he was hers. She was in high school. He was in college. She lied about her age. She had always looked older, my mother, and by the time she was fourteen, Grandma Mercy was already leaving her to care for two of her sisters, twelve-year-old Xiomara and one-year-old Tanisha, while she was at work.

My father says he didn’t know my mother’s real age, that she’d told him she was eighteen, that he found out only when Mercy caught them in bed. My mother says he didn’t really find out until they were applying for their marriage license a week later, when he finally got a look at her birth date.

My father had been a college activist, protesting the naval occupation of Culebra, studying literature,writing poems about American colonialism in Puerto Rico. My mother—so young, so desperate to leave her abusive mother, so in love with my father— would’ve done anything to keep him.

Sometimes when I write this story, I think of my mother as the villain, tricking my father, knowing the exact time my grandma Mercy would come home from work, leaving the bedroom door unlocked, forcing him to become a husband, a father, when what he really wanted was to read books and write poems and save the world. How maybe I wouldn’t be here if Grandma Mercy hadn’t threatened to have him thrown in jail.

Sometimes it’s my father who is the villain. The brilliant college student who pretended not to know my mother’s age as he slithered his way into her bed. How he decided to ignore the school uniform folded neatly and left on a chair in the corner of her bedroom.

They are different people now, divorced more than twenty-five years. But no matter how much they’ve changed, there is always this: My mother loved my father obsessively, violently, even years after their divorce. My father was a womanizer, withdrawn, absent. And it was after three children, after leaving Puerto Rico for Miami, after eleven years of marriage, after my father left her for the last time, that my mother started hearing voices, that she started snorting coke and smoking crack. But each time I write and rewrite this story, it’s not just my mother’s intense, all-consuming love for my father that destroys her. It’s also her own mother, Grandma Mercy. And her children—my older brother, my little sister, and me. Especially me.

By the time my mother was twenty-two, she had three children. She’d already been a mother for a third of her life. It was 1985. These were the days of Menudo and “We Are the World,” the year Macho Camacho gave a press conference in a leopard-skin loincloth as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blared from radios across theUnited States. In one month, the space shuttle Challenger would explode while all of America watched on television, entire classrooms full of kids, everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space.

In those days, Mami teased her blond hair like Madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner,applied several coats of black mascara, apple-red lipstick, and matching nail polish. She wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. She dusted her chest with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body, her hair. My mother loved lotions, perfume, makeup, clothes, shoes. But really, the truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. She walked around our apartment butt-ass naked. I was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. You should love your body, my mother would say. A woman’s body was beautiful, no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. This my mother firmly believed, and she would tell me over and over. As we got older, she would teach me and Alaina about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. This, she said, was perfectly normal. Nothing to be ashamed of.

While my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Ismael Rivera, my mother was all about Madonna. My mother was Puerto Rican but also American, she liked to remind us, born in New York, and she loved everything American. She belted the lyrics to “Holiday” while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches served with potato chips for lunch. She talked about moving us to Miami Beach, where Grandma Mercy and most of our titis lived, about making sure we learned English.

On New Year’s Eve, she made me wear a red-and-white striped dress and white patent leather shoes. Itwas hideous. I looked like a peppermint candy. She styled my hair in fat candy curls and said she wanted me to look like Shirley Temple. I had no idea who Shirley Temple was, but I hoped she didn’t expect me to be friends with her. I wasn’t trying to be friends with girls in dresses and uncomfortable shoes.

I knew that these were things meant for girls, and that I was supposed to like them. But I had no interest inmy mother’s curtains, or her tubes of red lipstick, or her dresses, or the dolls Grandma Mercy and Titi Xiomara sent from Miami. I didn’t want to be Barbie for Halloween, like my mother suggested. I wanted to be a ninja, with throwing stars and nunchucks and a sword. I wanted to kick the shit out of ten thousand men like Bruce Lee. I wanted to climb trees and catch frogs and play with Star Wars action figures, to fight withlightsabers and build model spaceships. I didn’t have a crush on Atreyu from The NeverEnding Story, like my brother said, teasing me. I wanted to be Atreyu, to ride Falkor the luckdragon. When I watched Conan theDestroyer, I wanted to be fierce and powerful Grace Jones. Zula, the woman warrior. I wanted her to be the one who saved the princess, to be the one the princess fell for in the end.

(Years later, would I think of Zula during that first kiss, that first throbbing between my legs? It would be with an older girl, the daughter of my parents’ friends. We’d steal my mother’s cigarettes, take them out back behind our building, and light them up. She would blow her smoke past my face, stick her tongue in my mouth, slide her hand inside my shorts. How she’d know just what to do without me having to tell her—this was everything, this butch girl, so unafraid, getting everything she wanted. And how willing I was to give it to her.)

Our new neighbor arrived in the middle of the night, carried her boxes from somebody’s pickup into herliving room, then waved goodbye as it drove away. She arrived in silence, filling the empty space of theapartment next door, where nobody had ever lived as long as I could remember, hung her flowerpots from hooks on the balcony. She arrived with almost nothing, just those plants and some furniture and her daughter Jesenia, a year older than me. The morning after, Eggy and I were outside catching lizards, holding onto them until they got away, leaving their broken-off tails still wriggling between our fingers. She stepped out on her balcony, watering her plants with a plastic cup. “Guess you have a new neighbor,” Eggysaid.

La vecina, as we learned to call her, was nothing like Mami. She wore no makeup, a faded floral housedress and out-of-style leather chancletas like my abuela’s, her curly brown hair in a low ponytail. She had deep wrinkles around the corners of her eyes, although she didn’t look as old as Abuela. When she looked up at Eggy and me, she smiled.

“Hola,” she said. “Where’s your mom?”

“Working,” I said.

She pressed her hand to her cheek. “And she lets you play outside by yourself?”

“Sure,” I said.

We talked for a while, la vecina asking us questions about the neighborhood, about the basketball courts, about what time the grano man came by on Sunday mornings. Eggy and I answered question after question, feeling like hostages until my father emerged.

“Buenas,” Papi said.

La vecina introduced herself, and Papi walked over, shook her hand over her balcony’s railing. They got to talking, ignoring me and Eggy, Papi smiling, the way he never smiled. My father always had a serious look on his face, a look that made him seem angry, even when he was happy. And he was always trying to look good, ironing his polo shirts, grooming his mustache every morning, massaging Lustrasilk Right On Curl into his hair before picking it out, even if he was just lying around the house on the weekend. The only time my father dressed down—in shorts, tank tops, and his white Nike Air Force high-tops—was when he played ball or when we went to the beach.

La vecina laughed at something he said, and my father patted his Afro lightly. When I saw the opening, I tapped Eggy on the shoulder and we took off running toward the basketball courts.

Excerpted from "Ordinary Girls" by Jaquira Diaz (out now from Algonquin Books). Used by permission.

Halloween is but a day away, and if you're like us, you've got a full queue of horror classics ready for viewing. And the best horror movies are so scary, so beloved, that we not only celebrate the films themselves - we celebrate the imagery of their posters. The folks at The Mill Shop decided to pay tribute to those images in an unsual way: by recreating them in fuzzy felt, resulting in something that looks less like Hollywood product, and more like a grade school art project. Check 'em out:

To see these and more fabric creations, visit The Mill Shop here.

I don't wanna overstate what an incredible week this is for home media, but let me put it like this: Criterion hits #1000 with a massive box set, #999 is a stone cold masterpiece, Netflix has two A+ new releases streaming, KL Studio Classics has two Scorsese gems ripe for discovery, and two of quite literally the greatest movies of all time are now available on gorgeous new 4K discs. All of that, and much more, in one of our busiest disc and streaming guides ever:

ON NETFLIX:

Tell Me Who I Am: In 1982, Alex Lucas came out of a coma and remembered nothing about his twenty-plus years on earth thus far – except the name and face of his twin brother, Marcus. Alex’s journey is a compelling one even on its face, addressing the existential horror of literally remembering nothing. And in its early stretches, Ed Perkins’s documentary grapples with the intellectual and psychological ramifications of amnesia, a welcome change for a medium that primarily uses the condition as hooks for action thrillers. But then it goes deeper, as he (and we) discover that Marcus has used his brother’s condition to rewrite their shared history, hiding a horrible secret from their past. This is a thoughtful, resonant film, asking one hard, existential question: given the choice not to know the truth of your worst trauma, what would you choose?

Dolemite Is My Name: Rudy Ray Moore was a lot of things – stand-up comedian, R&B singer, movie producer, action hero – but the one thing he wasn’t was a guy who took “no” for an answer. Eddie Murphy stars as Moore in this affectionate biopic, which covers his rise from hack nightclub emcee to recording sensation, and the production of his first, low-budget big-screen vehicle, Dolemite. As they did in Ed Wood, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski adroitly capture the communal spirit of a no-budget film shoot, while director Brewer (Hustle & Flow) manages to replicate some of the gonzo energy of those scrappy little movies. But the real news here is Murphy’s delightful lead performance; in bringing this long-lost legend back to life, he seems to rediscover some of his own comic mojo.

ON 4K UHD:

The Wizard of Oz: Warner Brothers went all out for the 80th anniversary edition of Victor Fleming’s perennial, using a new 8K 16bit scan of the original Technicolor camera negative to create this 4K UHD scan, and it looks incredible; the colors pop, the image is crisp, and the songs soar. But most of all, it’s still a great picture, a classic of Hollywood craftsmanship, filled with unforgettable songs, pitch-perfect performances, striking set pieces, and iconic moments. It takes a truly magical movie to continue connecting with audiences after all these years. This is a truly magical movie. (Includes audio commentary, TV special, featurettes, alternate audio tracks, radio versions, and trailers.)

It’s a Wonderful Life: No holiday season is complete without revisiting Frank Capra’s 1947 classic — albeit one that doesn’t even mention the holiday until somewhere near the 100-minute mark. And maybe that’s part of its appeal; it’s not just a feature-length sleigh-bell ring, but an emotionally complicated chronicle of life, family, and sacrifice. And thus, it manages to grow with the passing years, as the viewer’s own experiences render those of its protagonists even more resonant. Plus, one never gets tired of giggling at its FBI file. Paramount’s new 4K edition restores the film from the original nitrate negative (and two fine grain masters from the ‘40s), and it looks terrific – crisp, sharp, and gorgeous. (Also streaming on Amazon Prime.) (Includes featurettes.)

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

David Crosby: Remember My Name: “I’m afraid,” David Crosby confesses, early in A.J. Eaton’s documentary portrait. “I’m afraid to die. And I’m close. I don’t like it. I’d like to have more time. A lot more time.” Much of what follows is lighthearted – much of the movie springs from its subject driving around L.A., telling stories, deflating myths (“[Jim] Morrison, what a dork”), and singing along with the radio – but that plaintive confession of fear and mortality frames it all in a dark shadow, keeping it all from collapsing into hagiography as he speaks plainly and honestly about his additions, his flaws, and his difficulty sustaining relationships. Cameron Crowe produced and conducts the interviews, calling back to his early days at Rolling Stone, and Remember My Name is a lot like a great magazine profile: it captures the essence of the artist, briefly but effectively. (Includes extended and alternate scenes, extended interviews, and film festival Q&A.)

ON DVD / VOD:

Them That Follow: Earnest, and maybe a tad overwrought, this is nevertheless an affecting (and, frankly, sympathetic) portrait of backwoods fundamentalism — and I mean old-school, fire-and-brimstone, speaking in tongues, snake-waving fundamentalism. Alice Englert is Mara, the daughter of the local pastor (Walton Goggins), who gets herself into a bit of trouble with a boy outside the church, just as she’s being married off to a bland dolt within it. Englert is an excellent vessel for this deeply empathetic movie (we’re right there alongside her, all the way), and Goggins is terrific, capturing both the character’s charisma and stubbornness. But the sharpest performance comes from Olivia Colman, who completely disappears into her portrait of the devout woman who mothers the community — and knows all its secrets.

ON BLU-RAY:

Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954-1975: As the Criterion Collection inched ever-closer to the DVD/Blu-ray release #1000, many of us assumed they’d issue a giant box by a capital-I Important Filmmaker, like last year’s essential Ingmar Bergman collection. Instead, the company took the opportunity to remind us that pulp is art too, and applied their first four-digit number to this collection – 15 titles total, spread over eight discs (along with copious extras), collected in a handsome, hardback book. The quality, of course, varies wildly (there’s quite a dip between, say, Gojira and Godzilla vs. Hedorah), but even the goofiest titles serve up exactly what you want: guys in rubber monster suits, knocking over cities and fighting each other. (Includes audio commentary, English-language dubs, interviews, featurettes, archival documentary, new and archival interviews, and trailers.)

Matewan: John Sayles’s 1987 masterpiece is also getting the Criterion treatment this week, in a gorgeous new edition that makes Haskell Wexler’s stunning cinematography feel as soiled and authentic as a Matthew Brady photograph. Set in West Virginia in “19 and 20,” it concerns the struggle of miners for the Stone Mountain Mining Company to unionize, while their bosses intimidate them with scabs, “gun thugs,” and worse. Chris Cooper is fierce and fabulous as the idealistic union rep, while David Strathairn is glorious as the town’s unpredictable lawman. Sayles crafts an Alman-esque tapestry of intersecting lives, stories, motivations (and actors), moving smoothly from social drama to mournful Western, and every performance is an absolute gem. What a movie this is. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interview, and trailer.)

An American Werewolf in London: Just in time for Halloween, Arrow Video gifts us with a definitive edition of John Landis’s 1981 werewolf classic, loaded as ever with jolts and laughs. The latter are really what make this one special – it’s hard not to see the influence of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in the dynamic between leads David Naughton and Griffin Dunne – while Naughton’s charming romance with Jenny Agutter gives the story (and the dilemma at its center) unexpected human dimension. But above all, Rick Baker’s make-up effects remain jaw-dropping: the flesh hanging from Dunne’s face churns the stomach in HD (the new 4K restoration is from the original camera negative), while Naughton’s dizzyingly convincing transformations are still the gold standard. (Includes audio commentaries, feature-length documentaries, video essays, new and archival featurettes, new and archival interviews, outtakes, and trailers.)

Kundun: KL Studio Classics has been planning the long-overdue Blu-ray debut of Martin Scorsese’s 1997 biography of the 14th Dalai Lama for some time now, but the split-second timing feels like a reaction to the chorus of Marvel-masturbating knuckleheads who’ve insisted, since the director’s less than reverential statements re: the most popular movies in the world, that he’s only made “gangster movies.” Yet here is a meditative contemplation on fate and faith, and offering some of the purest aesthetic pleasures of Scorsese’s career: Robert Richardson’s cinematography is stunningly gorgeous, Philip Glass’ score is perfection, and Scorsese’s fascination with the rituals of the Buddhist religion creates several breathtaking sequences. It’s one of his most unique and breathtaking works. (Includes audio commentary, two feature-length documentaries, interviews, and trailer.)

New York Stories: And it’s accompanied by yet another “atypical” Scorsese movie – namely, Life Lessons, his contribution to this 1989 omnibus feature. (The films that follow, Francis Ford Coppola’s Life Without Zoe, and Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, are both pretty bad, but the disc is worth buying for Life Lessons alone.) It’s a scorching bit of short-form storytelling, the rich and detailed story of an action painter (Nick Nolte, never better) hanging on to the last scraps of an affair with a protégé (a wonderful Rosanna Arquette). Scorsese’s restless camera has seldom been more effectively used, bracingly circling its protagonist as he works and pines for the woman who is, moment by moment, slipping out of his grasp.

Days of Wine and Roses: Jack Lemmon, resourcefully using his charm and charisma to play a real heel, stars as an alcoholic PR man who gloms on to a bright career girl (Lee Remick); she’s frosty in their initial encounters, but her sensible resistance gives way to a boozy, impulsive, co-dependent relationship. Their cycle of recoveries and relapses – a perpetual circle of steps forward and back – are given real weight by the miraculous performances of the Oscar-nominated leads. Lemmon works his tail off in this demanding role, while Remick is uniquely skilled at tapping into the loneliness that drives the character. This early cinematic examination of alcoholism is, granted, a tad melodramatic. But director Blake Edwards grounds the picture in the credibility of their connection, and brother, his last shot is a punch right in the gut. (Includes audio commentary, Lemmon interview, and trailer.)

You don't just need technical skills or good equipment to be a great photographer - you also have to have the right eye, a way of seeing the world that others haven't. This idea is at the center of 'Hidden,' a new, curated series from Magnum Photos in partnership with Aperture. The series - which features prints from the likes of Susan Meiselas, Don McCullin, Stephen Shore, Alex Webb, Todd Hido, Daido Moriyama, Bruce Davidson, Nicole Krijno, Joel Meyerowitz and Justine Kurland - posits that photographers glimpse scenes that are often hidden from the rest of the world, capturing those people and places that others do not see.

Prints from the 'Hidden' series are on sale this week, signed by the photographers or estate-stamped, on Magnum's site; we have a few selections to share, along with some thoughts from their photographers.

Steve McCurry (Magnum Photos)

Near Zhengzhou, China. 2004.

“The world-renowned Shaolin Monastery is known to many for its association with martial arts, specifically Shaolin Kung Fu.

The physical strength and dexterity displayed by the monks is incredible, although they exude a deep serenity.”

Inge Morath (Magnum Photos)

Linda, the llama with its trainer, Mrs. Lorraine D’Essen. New York,

USA. 1957.

“This image is an outtake from Inge’s iconic story, ‘A Llama in Times Square’ published in the December 2, 1957 issue of LIFE magazine. The story showcases the humorous yetinsightful story of stage and television animal performers living in New York City. Linda, the llama is accompanied by one of her trainers and foster parent Mrs. Lorraine D’Essen, during a ride back home from a television show at ABC studios.”

- Sana Manzoor, Inge Morath Estate

Chris Steele-Perkins (Magnum Photos)

From “The Pleasure Principle.” Blackpool, England. 1982.

“It can be argued that, like the sculptor’s stone whose final shape always lies hidden until the sculptor reveals it to us, in a quantum universe the photograph has always existed, waiting for the photographer to take it and reveal its form, though the meaning still lies hidden.”

Mary Ellen Mark (Aperture)

Crissy, Jesse, Linda, and Dean Damm in their car, Los Angeles.

1987.

“While I was working with the Damm family, I thought about making a strong portrait of them in their car. It was impossible to take the photograph inside the car, because there just wasn’t enough space. Also, Runtley was a ferocious pit bull, and he would most surely bite me; the car was his territory. On the last day, I asked them to stop their car near a railroad track,

and I made this picture. I took several frames, but when Crissy spontaneously reached up and gently touched Jesse’s face, I knew that was the photograph.”

Justine Kurland (Aperture)

Dairy Queen. 2000.

“I wanted to make the invisible communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experience as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls—they would multiply through the sheer force of togetherness and lay claim to a new territory. Their collective awakening would ignite and spread through suburbs and schoolyards, calling to clusters of girls camped on stoops and the hoods of cars, or aimlessly wandering the neighborhoods where they lived.”

Thomas Hoepker (Magnum Photos)

Muhammad Ali. London, England. 1966.

“I’m sure there are hidden treasures in any analog archive one might never have the chance to discover. During my time as an active photo-reporter there was rarely a lot of time left between assignments to have a second or third look at the negatives that were not immediately published.

So when the theme of this Square Print project ‘Hidden’ came up, I did some more digging. I grabbed some folders of old negatives and unexpectedly found another Muhammad Ali picture that I had totally overlooked ’til today, even though I have published a lot of Ali pictures, including two books. It’s amazing to see him show so many different facets of his personality on a single film strip.”

Philippe Halsman (Magnum Photos)

‘Aquacade.’ Florida, USA. 1953.

“I was on assignment for LIFE [magazine] to shoot an international meet of underwater ballet swimmers. For three days I photographed the girls doing the most complicated wheels and tricks under water. Once, during a break, the winning Canadian team came to the surface to gulp for air. From the bottom of the pool I photographed them treading water.”

- Philippe Halsman, Halsman at Work, Yvonne Halsman (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989)

Bruce Davidson (Magnum Photos)

Subway. New York City, USA. 1980.

“This photograph was taken as part of an ongoing series of color subway portraits in the early 1980s. I used to explore different subway lines, taking them to the end and then back again. One day I spotted this young man on the subway train at Coney Island, who absorbed so much bright sun he appeared to be radiant. His glowing skin tone seemed to match the chains around his neck, which James Agee would often refer to as ‘badges of being.’ The fact that his face is in shadow implies ‘hidden’ to me. Although our meeting was momentary, he gave himself to the camera and then was gone, back into the bowels of Brooklyn. Forty years later I was told that this man, who was 20 at the time, became a prominent physical trainer.”

Todd Hido (Aperture)

#7851. 2008.

“I drive, I drive a lot.People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them I drive around. I drive and drive and I mostly don’t find anything that is interesting to me. But then, something calls out. Something that looks sort of off or maybe an empty space. Sometimes it’s a sad scene. I like that kind of stuff. I remember this foggy night, wondering about the hidden world behind the frosted glass of the garage door. Did somebody just leave the light on? Or is there a whole world of activity going on in the middle of the night out in the garage under the veil of the fog? And so I keep driving and looking and taking pictures.”

Don McCullin (Aperture)

Protester, Cuban Missile Crisis, Whitehall, London. 1962.

“In 1962, when the world nearly went to war again over the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were massive demonstrations in London’s Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, where this shot was taken. This one man broke from the rabble of many thousands trying to make a run for 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence. Police formed a cordon to prevent him and to hold back ensuing crowds. So he made his political statement by sitting himself down in front of them. What slogan was he brandishing on that banner? Who was he? What happened to him? His statement may have made headlines, but he remains forever anonymous, caught up entirely in his own activism.”

You don't often hear about artistic collaborations between photographers and knitters, but that's exactly what Joseph Ford and Nina Dodd have created with their "Invisible Jumpers" project, collected in a new book (out in the U.S. on November 25) from Hoxton Mini Press. For these intricate but breezy images, Dodd knits garments intended to blend into a selected environment; Ford then photographs their model, in the garment, in the environment, creating an eye-popping camouflage effect.

We've picked out a few of our favorite photos from the collection; to see more, follow Joseph Ford (on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and Nina Ford (on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram), or pre-order a copy of Invisible Jumpers now.

To see more, follow Joseph Ford (on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and Nina Ford (on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram), or pre-order a copy of Invisible Jumpers now.

Few figures have been as lionized by popular culture as Joan of Arc - so much so that it's become difficult to separate fact from mythology. This is one of the many achievements of Joan of Arc, Helen Castor's best-selling, meticulously researched account of her life, which not only tells her story with fidelity, but places it within the oft-missing wider historical context.

The Folio Society's new editon of Joan of Arc (available now) augments Castor's riveting text with archive documents, paintings, and other illustrations - as well as a new foreword by the author. We're pleased to present this edited excerpt.

FROM "JOAN OF ARC" (FOLIO SOCIETY EDITION)

When I was writing this book, I was acutely aware that, over the centuries, Joan has become both instantly recognisable in image and almost infinitely malleable in meaning. ‘All things to all people’ still seems to me an appropriate way of describing a figure who has lent her name to everything from a North American brand of canned beans (under the slogan ‘JOAN of ARC^® – the Heroic Bean!’) to a recent track by British girl group Little Mix (‘Man, I feel like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Queen of Hearts’). In fact, along with her many iterations in art, literature, opera and film, I suspect there have been more pop songs written about Joan – Kate Bush, Madonna and Leonard Cohen are only the first few names on the list – than about any other individual in history.

But, in versions of her story that are not completely unmoored from the recorded details of her life, the central elements of her persona are her nationalism, in the positive sense of national self-determination, and her faith. She has been specifically claimed, in other words, by both France and Rome, however much her general appeal might extend to other causes and denominations. And what is striking about this construction of Joan as her country’s patron saint is how much it obscures, rather than illuminates, the complex reality of her history.

Joan said that she was fighting for France against the English; she said that she was sent by God. But she did so in the midst of a brutal civil war, in which many French men and women saw Joan’s dauphin as the enemy, and the English as their allies. The conflict bitterly divided the French Church as well as the State, which is how Joan came to be condemned as a heretic by a court of French theologians and canon lawyers who recognised the king of England as the rightful king of France. Two decades after her execution, her dauphin finally won the war. He did so, in large part, by making real the world that Joan had described and for which she had fought: through diplomatic manoeuvres and military campaigns, he reunited the French under his own kingship and expelled the invading English. Now, Joan was vindicated, but she was also an embarrassment: a reminder that the truth, in its current form, had not always been so.

She was retrospectively cleared of heresy; a necessary step, given that she had led the king to his coronation and stood beside him as he was anointed. Beyond that, there was every reason for the powers-that-be in mid-fifteenth-century France to deal with the difficulties of the past by opting for oblivion rather than truth and reconciliation. Joan, after all, had suffered defeats as well as winning victories. The king believed the God-given triumph to be his own, rather than Joan’s to bestow upon him. And those among his subjects who had once fought for a different version of their country’s future – the captains who had taken up arms against Joan, and the clerics who had condemned her – could point to the undoubted culpability of the English and move on, as loyal subjects of a reunified kingdom.

But Joan’s blazing charisma and her uniquely transgressive story – claiming military leadership under a divine mandate in a world that believed neither was the preserve of women – turned out to mean that forgetting was not an option. Instead, it was the civil war that was jettisoned from the narrative. As years became decades, and decades centuries, she became a constantly reinvented version of what she had always claimed to be: the champion of a people, a sovereign nation-state defending itself against external assault – a role that, in its iconic clarity, played its own part in burying the messy reality of the conflict that had consumed her.

Her transformation into a saint was less straightforward. She had been tried and found guilty of heresy by an ecclesiastical court. Her horrifying death could hardly make her a martyr, therefore, since she had been executed on the authority of the universal Church, however much it had been, in that time and place, a Church divided against itself, and despite the nullification of the verdict after her dauphin’s victory. In this context, it took half a millennium for Joan’s messy reality to recede. Her trials had been political, and she had not died for the faith, the Holy See concluded in its investigations over the three decades before 1920; but she had lived a life of heroic Christian virtue, and that was enough for her sanctity to be recognised.

The mutating interaction of these two paradigms – her goodness and her justified resistance to an invading power – produces the intercessory, peace-loving Joan of so many modern images. But that is not the woman who died in the fire in 1431. This book seeks to reclaim, in all its difficulty, what it is possible to know about her short and challenging life. From the beginning of the story, on the battlefield at Agincourt fourteen years before Joan arrived at Chinon to declare her mission, I have tried to inhabit the perspectives of the various protagonists and participants in the conflict; to see the world through their eyes while their angles of vision change, and to convey the certainty of their truths, even when their truths are incompatible and inconsistent.

As a result, I hope the book is also a reminder of how profoundly it matters who succeeds in shaping our stories, in the past and in the present, and how essential it is to interrogate the ways in which narratives can be controlled and co-opted by those with an interest in directing them. In 2019, that task is more urgent than ever.

Helen Castor

London, January 2019

Excerpted from the foreword to "Joan of Arc" by Helen Castor, out now from The Folio Society. Used by permission.