It’s too early to predict who will win the big streaming wars of the coming decade (which is supposed to bury us alive in subscriber-based content), but I like HBO’s chances lately. If the launch of HBO Max in 2020 expands on the sort of decisively outstanding quality the network demonstrated with its 2019 premium-cable […]

List season? It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Just not if you’re the type of muso who finds best-of lists to be tacky, reflexive rituals that serve only to replicate and reinforce the marketplace’s ugliest, corniest competitive impulses. I hear that. But maybe instead of approaching a best-of list as a hierarchy, think […]

Just when you think that Hollywood has become incapable of making anything but tired retreads and money-grabbing sequels, you look back on the year and think: Huh. So they can still surprise us after all. This was the year when “Avengers: Endgame” and “Spider-Man: Far From Home” demonstrated that, Martin Scorsese notwithstanding, the difference between […]

The 2019 exhibition calendar was unusually crammed with heavily hyped shows, not to mention floating suspense and sudden combustions of fear and loathing. Protests against “toxic philanthropy” at the Whitney Biennial led to the resignation of Warren Kanders, the vice president of the museum’s board. And after years of prevaricating, museums on both sides of […]

As the decade draws to a close, it’s clear that we’re looking at TV differently

Whether you first saw him on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” or as the rumpled personification of a PC in a series of computer commercials, John Hodgman is not quite who you think. He still specializes in an oddball brand of comedy on display in his list-driven books of invented facts, starting with 2005’s […]

‘The Two Popes,’ with Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, is a charming if not quite divine buddy movie that imagines conversations between Pope Benedict XVI and the future Pope Francis in the Vatican power change.