What to Know About Temu and Its Super Bowl Ads

A shopping app splurged on a repeat ad on Super Bowl Sunday, and it wasn’t a household name like Amazon. It was Temu, a ecommerce app that is connected to Chinese company Pinduoduo. The app, although only four-months old, has recently been one of the most downloaded free apps in the U.S. on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

The 30-second commercial, which played in tw…

Read more

What the Debate Over Cleopatra’s ‘Race’ Gets Wrong

The monumental legacy of Cleopatra, Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, is frequently eclipsed by reductive contemporary discussions over her identity. She has been variously claimed as Macedonian, Greek, Egyptian, and African.

Debates over Cleopatra’s “race” were reactivated after Netflix released a trailer for its four-part docudrama Queen Cleopatra last w…

Read more

The True Story Behind American Nightmare

Warning: This post contains spoilers for American Nightmare.

Denise Huskins says that when she was released on March 25, 2015, by one of the men who had kidnapped her two days earlier, the last thing she was thinking about was ensuring everything she had been through sounded believable. But almost immediately after reaching safety, Huskins, then 29, star…

Read more

Warner Bros. Discovery in Merger Talks With Paramount Global

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. held talks on a possible merger with Paramount Global, potentially combining two of the biggest media companies in the world, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The talks are preliminary and may not lead to an agreement, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are at such an early stage.

David Zaslav, …

Read more

Willem Dafoe Is Trapped Art Thief in ‘Inside’

It’s a wonder we didn’t all go mad. How did we even survive the early days of the pandemic, a seemingly interminable epoch during which many of us spent long hours holed up in our sad little towers, captives in sweatpants gazing longingly at the outside world? Vasilis Katsoupis’ intriguingly odd little psychological thriller Inside isn’t a pandemic parable per se,…

Read more

Who Will—and Should—Win at the 2023 Grammys

The 65th Annual Grammy Awards are set to take place this Sunday, and the nominations are stacked. The musicians up against one another in the major categories have broken numerous records, shifted the culture, and released albums that still have people talking months after their music was released. Beyoncé is back with her momentous album Renaissance, up for nine awards including …

Read more

Who Was Bayard Rustin-

This year marked the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (“March on Washington” for short) on Aug. 28, 1963. And yet, Bayard Rustin, the maestro behind the planning of the March on Washington, is still not a household name 60 years later. A new movie plans to change that. Rustin, out in select t…

Read more

Wharton + Bridgerton = The Buccaneers

From The Gilded Age to Gossip Girl, Edith Wharton’s novels of late-19th-century Manhattan high society have loomed large over the TV dramas of the 21st century. So it’s surprising that we don’t see more Wharton adaptations on the small screen. Finally, Apple TV+ has taken on her unfinished final novel, The Buccaneers, and the result, debuting Nov. 8, ow…

Read more

Why This Director Portrayed the Nakba in Netflix’s ‘Farha’

A lot has happened since Jordanian director Darin Sallam’s debut feature film Farha had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year: Jordan selected the movie as its 2023 Oscars entry, it secured best youth film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, and it reached a much larger audience when it arrived on Netflix last week.

Set in an unnamed Palestini…

Read more