During the years I kicked around Hollywood grabbing writing gigs here and there, I would attend a weekly theater gathering — Tuesdays@9, produced by the Naked Angels. Writers would bring in about 10 minutes of material to workshop with actors who turned up to get in a little scene work. The whole event was an excuse […]

“His goal wasn’t teaching robots to discover their humanity,” the narrator of Sunny, an Apple TV+ dark dramedy set in near-future Kyoto, says about Masa, a robotics engineer who’s presumed dead after the flight carrying him and his son crashes in northern Japan. “What excited him was realizing how they could help us discover ours.” […]

A Different Man is a noir-inflected black comedy about the adage, popularized by Truman Capote and attributed to Teresa of Ávila, that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Indie filmmaker Aaron Schimberg’s third feature depicts an odd and volatile love triangle between two men with facial deformities and a woman who […]

Former Russian Prime Minister and longtime Vladimir Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev recently made a bold prediction that the United States would soon collapse into a second civil war brought on by the 2024 presidential election. While such dire prognostication would usually be dismissed quickly as hyperbolic post-Soviet propaganda spewed by a government hit hard by […]