Shirley Li

In his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez turned a century-long history lesson into a mesmerizing read. His prose is rhythmic and rambling. He spins tales both mundane and magical. And as he […]

This article contains spoilers for the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig. When the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins, an Iranian lawyer named Iman (played by Missagh Zareh) has just been promoted to “investigating judge.” The

When Mean Girls, the musical remake of the 2004 film, hit theaters in January, the film appeared to shock audiences for, well, being a musical. Theatergoers recorded the moment that their fellow viewers realized what kind of movie it was;

Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film,

The first chapter of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 best seller, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, opens on a December evening in 1972, when masked intruders entered the West Belfast home of Jean McConville,

Updated at 8:50 p.m. E.T. on November 18, 2024 Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was

Early in the film Emilia Pérez, a lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is kidnapped and stuffed inside a van, with a hood placed over her head. “Are you afraid?” her kidnapper asks. Rita, trembling and breathing heavily as she’s taken

When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he

In Conclave, Vatican City isn’t immune to election-season absurdity. Focus Features October 30, 2024, 8 AM ET Early in the film Conclave, cardinals from around the world descend upon Vatican City after the death of the pope. Dressed in their

Sean Baker’s new film, Anora, could have starred Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling. Early in the project’s development, a producer interested in Baker’s script had wanted to woo the actors. Inside a coffee shop in West Hollywood a few weeks