Culture

Trial and Error Wackily Spoofs the True-Crime Craze

The new NBC series makes a mockumentary out of a poetry professor accused of murdering his wife.

• Sophie Gilbert
• 4:06 PM ET

The Summer-Blockbuster Season Is Already Here

Big-budget franchise hits like Logan and Kong: Skull Island are now mainstays of a month that was usually left to broad comedies and family films.

• David Sims
• 2:28 PM ET

Is Girls Heading Toward a Conventional Happy Ending?

Hannah Horvath's latest decision is an unexpected twist for the HBO show.

• Sophie Gilbert
• Mar 12, 2017

Saturday Night Live Makes the Case That Ivanka Is 'Complicit'

The show is finally acknowledging that the president’s daughter makes her own decisions … via an ad for her new “fragrance.”

• Megan Garber
• Mar 12, 2017

Biggie Smalls and Casablanca: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Highlights from seven days of writing about arts and entertainment

• The Editors
• Mar 11, 2017

The Atlantic's Week in Culture

A weekly roundup of our writing on arts and entertainment

• The Editors
• Mar 10, 2017

Amal Clooney's Baby Bump and the Awkward State of the Media Brand

A Time story got pilloried for focusing not on the speech the human rights lawyer delivered to the U.N., but on her “baby bump.” It deserved the mockery … and, in another way, it didn’t.

• Megan Garber
• Mar 10, 2017

A 50-Song Memoir Brilliantly Argues Music Can Change Lives

The tracks on the Magnetic Fields’ new album take on Stephin Merritt’s biography year by year, but the underlying story is about art itself.

• Spencer Kornhaber
• Mar 10, 2017

How Buffy the Vampire Slayer Redefined TV Storytelling

Creator Joss Whedon’s narrative risk-taking—seamlessly blending episodes-of-the-week with heavy serialization—set the tone for the Golden Age of television.

• David Sims
• Mar 10, 2017

‘The Body’: The Radical Empathy of Buffy’s Best Episode

As the WB show turns 20, a look at how it dealt with grief in season five

• Sophie Gilbert
• Mar 9, 2017

Kong: Skull Island Is a Likable Near-Miss

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s Vietnam-era reimagination of the giant ape is just good enough to make you wish it were better.

• Christopher Orr
• Mar 9, 2017

Inside France’s Most Controversial Film of the Moment  

The debate around the new French arthouse drama This Is Our Land says a lot about the rise of the country’s far-right.  

• Boyd van Hoeij
• Mar 9, 2017

A Forgotten Novel Reveals a Forgotten Harlem

Discovered 70 years after it was written, Claude McKay’s Amiable With Big Teeth depicts an overlooked time in African American history when communism and black nationalism found themselves entangled.

• Jennifer Wilson
• Mar 9, 2017

Personal Shopper Is an Unusual Postmodern Ghost Story

Olivier Assayas’s new film stars Kristen Stewart as a grief-stricken Parisian fashionista who moonlights as a medium.

• David Sims
• Mar 8, 2017

Exit West and the Edge of Dystopia

Mohsin Hamid’s striking, lyrical new novel explores how lives can be upended in the blink of an eye.

• Sophie Gilbert
• Mar 8, 2017

The Game of Thrones Live Experience Lets Fans Bask in the Highlights

The composer Ramin Djawadi leads a concert tour that’s less a musical showcase than a rewind through the HBO drama’s six seasons.

• Spencer Kornhaber
• Mar 7, 2017

We Sell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook is a 1970s-era artifact that has found its proper home in the anxious world of 2017.

• Megan Garber
• Mar 7, 2017

When Saturday Night Live Loses Alec Baldwin

The show’s current Donald Trump impressionist is signaling his imminent departure, and there doesn’t seem to be a backup plan.

• David Sims
• Mar 7, 2017