Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face onstage at the Oscars on Sunday night, stunning viewers across the world and causing a social media storm.
The Best Actor winner has since publicly apologized to the comedian. “Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,” he posted on Instagram. “I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of li…
Read more
It’s been 13 long years since Avatar—or any other film directed by James Cameron—debuted on the big screen. Hollywood has transformed since then: In 2009, Blockbuster hadn’t even declared bankruptcy yet. Since then, Disney has acquired 20th Century Fox, the studio that financed the first Avatar movie; expensive action films without superheroes now rarel…
Read more
In 1624, the kingdom of Ndongo in West Central Africa (modern-day Angola) got a new queen: Njinga. Her life as the first female ruler (or woman king) of the region forms the story of African Queens, a new Netflix docudrama series executive produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith.
From a military base on the Kwanza River, 42-year-old Njinga (Adesuwa Oni) rules with her sisters, …
Read more
Another season of Peacock’s wonderful reality competition The Traitors is in the books. (Don’t worry, if you haven’t seen the finale yet, you’ll find no spoilers here.) Some of us have complained about the show’s choice to cast only celebrities, the vast majority of them reality TV stars, this season. But even we have to admit that casting director Deena Katz’s picks resulted in …
Read more
The three-part miniseries A Very British Scandal—out April 22 on Amazon Prime Video—dramatizes one of the longest, most expensive, and scandalous divorce cases of the 20th century. In 1963, a judge dissolved the marriage of the aristocratic Duke and Duchess of Argyll, condemning the latter as a promiscuous woman with a “debased sexual appetite.”
Claire Foy, …
Read more
We’ve entered a strange moment in history where every year feels somehow both a burning furnace of upheaval and recreation and a frozen monolith we are made to unwillingly re-encounter over and over. The images captured by TIME’s global roster of photojournalists over the course of 2022 reveal how deeply these two opposing trends penetrated society and public discourse this past yea…
Read more
The James Bond literary franchise, written from 1953 to 1966, will receive a sensitivity review ahead of a reissue in April of the 14 novels, which will mark 70 years since Casino Royale, the debut book, was published.
Ian Fleming Publications Ltd—the company that retains literary rights to the series about 007, the iconic British secret service agent—commissioned the …
Read more When it comes to athletes, few figures loom larger in the collective imagination than NBA legend, Michael Jordan. Over the course of his storied career and beyond, Jordan, considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, has also been hailed as an icon of marketing, thanks to lucrative endorsement deals—chief among them, his longtime partnership with Nike, whose gargan…
Read more
Legacy and the driving forces of popular culture often seem interchangeable. Both exist in the zeitgeist as collective experiences, memories, people, and even fictional characters that have moved or shaped a culture or its people. How many times have we scrolled passed ads from movie studios or literary presses touting the next big thing?
Yet, while pop culture can be crammed into quiz sh…
Read more
No matter how you feel about Black Mirror—and opinions tend to cluster at opposite extremes of the spectrum—you have to admit it’s a brilliant title. As creator Charlie Brooker wrote when the series premiered on Channel 4 in 2011, “The ‘black mirror’ of the title is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: th…
Read more