The fact that Lady Chatterley’s Lover has landed on Netflix—a mainline to pop culture—would have shocked the public as recently as 1960. English author D. H. Lawrence’s novel tells the story of a young married woman (Connie Chatterly), her husband’s gamekeeper (Oliver Mellors), and the forbidden love between them. The book was first published privately in 19…
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A week ahead of its release, Beyoncé revealed the track list for her hotly anticipated upcoming seventh studio album, Renaissance. The album will drop in the wee hours of the morning, at midnight on July 29, though it reportedly leaked two days ahead of its scheduled release. A single which dropped in June, “Break My Soul,” suggested that the album might be stro…
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After a scheduled weeklong break, the high-profile defamation trial between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard resumed on May 16. The trial, which began on April 11 in Fairfax, Va., centers on a defamation lawsuit Depp filed against Heard in 2019 over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed she wrote about domestic abuse.
In the piece, Heard referred to herself as a survivor of domestic ab…
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Former Disney Channel heartthrob and song-and-dance man extraordinaire Zac Efron should be a much bigger star than he is, though maybe it’s better this way: those of us who love him can be happy whenever he shows up, without having to worry about Efron overkill. In Peter Farrelly’s Greatest Beer Run Ever, Efron plays Chickie Donohue, a young Merchant Mariner from the Manhat…
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Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and Netflix bubble. October is upon us, and so too are some spooky offerings from the streamer. On Oct. 12, The Fall of the House of Usher combines inspiration from the Edgar Allen Poe short story with Mike Flanagan’s flair for horror to tell a story about a crumbling family dynasty. On Oct. 20, Disco Inferno follows a young couple…
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When the trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was released on Thursday, social media users noticed that Mera, played by Amber Heard, appears for about two seconds toward the end. This movie is Heard’s first acting project since the infamous 2022 defamation trial that thrust her and her ex-husband Johnny Depp into the public eye and subjected Heard, in particular, to intense vitri…
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The internet can’t stop talking about “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” trendy new descriptors for the type of expensive minimalism that has long been associated with a certain brand of old money. With thanks to TikTok, Succession, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom looks for setting and proliferating the trend, communicating wealth through under-the-r…
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Barbie is an icon, perhaps the best known toy in the world. As Margot Robbie points out in an interview with me for a TIME cover story, the word “Barbie” has the sort of enviable global recognition only achieved by brands like Coca-Cola. Since her debut in 1959, she has been a staple of the culture, a touchpoint for pop icons like Nicki Minaj, and has become synonymous with a specif…
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You could be forgiven for never having heard of The Butler’s Night Off, an obscure 1951 Canadian film that was a little bit of noir, a little bit of comedy and a whole lot of forgettable. Indeed it would have been forgotten entirely, were it not for a small part played by a 20-year-old actor whose character name was simply listed as “a crook” and whose real name, as p…
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Scrolling through social media these days, you’ll see that loud extremists continue to dominate COVID-19 discourse. At one pole are the denialists who argue—incorrectly—that COVID is “just a cold.” At the other are those who suggest that no meaningful progress has been made in controlling its devastation. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle.
We h…
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