In an extended conversation about a particular NBA team’s mantra and how it applies to being a stand-up comedian, “Hacks” shows everything that makes it so great. — As a longtime basketball fan, the first thought I had when I saw that Episode 3 of the new season of Hacks was titled “Trust The Process” was: “that can’t be a reference to the Philadelphia 76ers, can it?” The Emmy-winning Hacks, centered on a legendary female stand-up comic (Deborah…

Repetition and varying sentence lengths is a very useful way to inject rhythm into writing, and “Fight Club” is a great example. — The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. If there’s one line from Chuck Palahniuk’s first novel that has transcended the book, as well as David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation, this is it. Walk up to any millennial on the street and ask them if…

The Facebook Papers highlight an array of serious problems with its product. Most of them can be tempered if users had to pay to use Facebook. — Since Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, first revealed herself as the whistleblower behind the Facebook Papers earlier this month, Facebook has become the subject of the closest thing to a public reckoning it has ever faced. The papers have not revealed anything Big Tech pundits don’t already know…

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel is about wealth, social class, and fantasy. It’s also a subtle depiction of loneliness. — The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature that people are always reading, so much so that people write essays about why people are always reading it. Fitzgerald’s novel is about many things, such as wealth, social class, and fantasy — “illusions and delusions”, as Wesley Morris…

Alongside Maya Hawke, Andrew Garfield does his best Joker impression in Gia Coppola’s Black Mirror-esque critique of social media. — It’s a cliché nowadays to say that we’re all slaves to our phones and social media, but it’s an analogy worth keeping in mind when thinking about Mainstream. Even more so, the words of self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, who wrote that “the master’s tools will never…

Suki Waterhouse takes the lead in Simon Barrett’s surprising and subversive slasher-whodunit disguised as a supernatural horror movie. — The first sign that Seance has intentions of being more than a run-of-the-mill horror movie comes early, in the cold open, when a group of girls perform a séance in their dormitory bathroom and none of them scream when it seemingly succeeds and an entity rises out of a bathtub.

In the new dark-comedy thriller, Rosamund Pike plays a wolf that preys on seniors, and unintentionally adds to the #FreeBritney movement. — Ben Affleck may have been the star of David Fincher’s 2014 film Gone Girl, but it was Rosamund Pike that stole the show. Her portrayal of the missing-wife-turned-mastermind-antiheroine instantly made Amy Dunne one of the best villains in film history (notice I didn’t say “female villains”), while also earning praise…

John Lee Hancock’s new serial killer thriller starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto sticks closely to “Se7en” with the big things, as well as the small. — “It’s the little things that are important. It’s the little things that get you caught”, Deputy Sheriff Deke (Denzel Washington) tells Detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) in The Little Things. Deke is in L.A. from Kern County running an errand and ends up consulting on a case that Baxter has…

Made shortly after 2011’s “Contagion”, the period medical series “The Knick” features a disease subplot involving the discovery of asymptomatic carriers, contract tracing, and quarantine. — Last April, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven Soderbergh was named the head of a Directors Guild committee that would consult with epidemiologists and generate a “comprehensive guide” to help the filmmaking industry return to work safely. Why Steven Soderbergh? …