From the hyperpop mania of Charli XCX to the whiskey-soaked sounds of Beyoncé’s country foray to “That’s that me, espresso.” Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, YouTube The temperatures are warming, the windows opening, and a pop or pop-adjacent album is being released every week. This year’s song-of-summer bracket promises bops and bangers of all types, fit for many situations. Here, a guide to maximizing the current deluge.
When Ryan North — the writer behind Marvel’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and the Adventure Time books — was in ninth grade, he read his first Shakespeare play: Romeo and Juliet. He wasn’t impressed. His problem was with the ending: “I found it really frustrating,” North says. “I always thought that if Romeo just waited for five minutes, if he stopped to pick up some flowers or something, he’d show up, Juliet would be awake, and you’d get a happy ending.
Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler in Murder Mystery 2. Every once in a while, the simulation throws a curveball at you. Murder Mystery 2, Netflix’s sequel to the utterly disposable 2019 Adam Sandler–Jennifer Aniston comedy Murder Mystery, a film about as inventive as its title, doesn’t look promising at all. It has Sandler and Aniston returning as husband and wife Nick and Audrey Spitz, two New Yorkers who in the previous film wound up in the middle of a wealthy European family’s blood-soaked inheritance high jinks and attempted to solve the case.
Day 7: Love Is Enormous Twenty-five moments, one per day in the walkup to Christmas, that brought definition to reality TV’s ever-blurring lines in 2023. Day 7: Love Is Enormous Twenty-five moments, one per day in the walkup to Christmas, that brought definition to reality TV’s ever-blurring lines in 2023. It’s oddly appropriate that one of the biggest Netflix reality-show moments of 2023 revolved around an unplanned twist. On April 16, the streamer’s much-hyped plan to air a live reunion special for its hit show Love Is Blind went spectacularly awry when technical demons prevented the vast majority of subscribers from actually watching the event.
Spoilers below! Photo: Netflix Major spoilers for The Cloverfield Paradox below.
Movies are like skyscraper-sized monsters tearing through Manhattan: You generally know when one’s coming. Not so with Julius Onah’s The Cloverfield Paradox, which stunned the world’s geeks by being abruptly announced and released in the space of just a few hours on Sunday night. It’s the third film in the J.J. Abrams–produced Cloverfield franchise, which began almost exactly ten years ago with Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield and continued with 2016’s Dan Trachtenberg–helmed 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Photo: Richard Termine/Courtesy of BAM
Kate Fleetwood, who plays shady Lady Mac in the excellently scary British production of Macbeth that opened on Broadway last night after a sold-out run at BAM, didn’t threaten us with violence after the show the way her co-star Patrick Stewart did the other day. Not that her mind can’t go that way. The production is set in a dank basement kitchen that players enter via a sinister elevator.
Along with his homeboys the News, Huey Lewis has been dormant since 2001’s Plan B. But now Huey Lewis is back! A few weeks ago, the band released Soulville, a Stax cover album that features Huey’s vocal takes on classic cuts from the likes of Solomon Burke, the Staple Singers, and Joe Tex. Vulture recently got Lewis on the phone to talk about musical influences, Detroit vs. Memphis, and, of course, Back to the Future.
vulture lists May 29, 2023 20 of Tim Robinson’s Best (Non-ITYSL) SketchesDon’t think of this as a list of sketches from SNL, the Second City, and elsewhere. It’s more of a “cosmic gumbo.” By Hershal Pandya ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK5705qerGeZYsGptc2kZLKnpWLAqbvUpZtmpJWWw6Z51qKroWWknrpuvs6boKern6N8
Finally, it’s happened. Someone has managed to make Idris Elba unsexy, and that someone is, of course, Macklemore. Just when you’re longing to get an eyeful of Idris dressed to the nines in some impeccably tailored Bond suit, here he is serving Cruella De Vil in the Mack’s bizarre new video for their “Dance Off” collaboration. (Yep, that happened.) His look comes complete with a giant fur coat (obviously), a fedora, and Idris doing his best “Thriller” narration — and that’s just the first 16 seconds.
Stage Fright Not all video-game levels are created easily. Stage Fright Not all video-game levels are created easily. Imagine chess, but instead of knights and pawns, you’ve got combat mechs and techno beetles. You build a team of pieces to suit your strengths and counter your opponent’s strategies, all in the service of defending cities scattered about the board — alongside mountains, rivers, ice fields, and more — from a violent alien race.