Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston, and Thomas Sadoski in “The Newsroom.” Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN P. JOHNSON / HBO As this review indicates, I wasn’t a fan of the first four episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” In the two years since that blazing pan, however, I’ve calmed down enough to enjoy the…

Hope you've always wanted a smartphone-controlled door lock because the tech world is here to shove them in your face. Or hand, rather. Several companies, with more on their way, are competing to be the clever barrier between you and the inside of your home. What all of the locks have in common: you…

Once upon a time, a new technology happened along. It was called radio. Soon enough, some people began plucking wireless transmissions out of the air for their own purposes. One clever young man in Washington figured out how to intercept messages that Navy units sent to one another. “He has…

I come to bury Aaron Sorkin, not to praise him. With only one episode left before the end of The Newsroom , Sorkin managed to produce an episode of the series that exemplified all of its worst tendencies, to such an extreme that it may make it impossible for me to take anything he writes or has…

The Internet features more than its share of negativity and snark—sometimes you’ve just gotta vent . But there’s plenty of room for love, too. With Fan Up , we ask pop-culture people we admire to tell us about something they really, really like. The fans: Killer Mike and El-P are both hip-hop…

The St. Louis county officials released photos of Officer Darren Wilson after his altercation with Michael Brown. We've finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson . Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.…

By Jenna Wortham The comedian Hannibal Buress has a bit in his act about trying to hail a cab in New York as a black man. He walks up to the taxi and tries to open the door, but rather than pick him up, the driver hits the gas and speeds away, with Buress running alongside the cab. “I don’t know…

Kurt Cobain by Jesse Frohman, August 1993. Every photographer wants to take that picture. To steal a moment that endures, that traverses the globe, and becomes emblematic of the subject beyond just a freeze frame in time. In terms of music there are countless examples—like that shot of Iggy Pop,…

Diamond D – The Unkut Interview Wednesday February 12th 2014, Filed under: Bronx Bombers , Features , Great Moments In Rap , Interviews , Not Your Average , The 90's Files , Track-By-Track Written by: Growing up in Forest Projects in the South Bronx, DJ Diamond D embarked on a career as a local DJ…

Monday marked the start of a new phase of the 2014 awards season: one that involves the actual giving of awards instead of mere speculation and prognostication. Let’s state right up front that the New York Film Critics Circle, which has been picking annual winners for 80 years now, is not an Oscar…

Who owns Star Wars ? a) Disney b) The fans c) George Lucas d) All of the above e) Sheinhardt Wig Company In the latest Laser Age entry, “Why Star Wars ?” , my colleague Keith Phipps considered the personal and cultural forces that gave rise to perhaps the greatest blockbuster phenomenon in history.…

The visionaries behind some of the year's most visually striking movies — 'Unbroken,' 'Into the Woods,' 'Gone Girl,' 'The Theory of Everything,' 'Noah' and 'Mr. Turner' — open up about everything from how to develop a relationship with a director to high-dynamic-range technologies This story first…

This is the only way I can get time off. I have to kill myself to get time off. —CM Punk Ten months ago, CM Punk left WWE. It was the biggest pro wrestling story line of the year, and it wasn’t even mentioned onscreen until two months after his departure , when WWE was in Punk’s hometown of Chicago.…

To kick off THR's annual awards-season series, 'Chef's' Jon Favreau, 'The Theory of Everything's' Anthony McCarten, 'The Imitation Game's' Graham Moore and 'Interstellar's' Jonathan Nolan open up about everything from their role models to the trick to writing "perfect movies." Says Flynn: "I'm all…

Writing for THR's current issue, the 'Top Five' writer, director and star tackles Hollywood's third rail as he explains what it's really like to be black in the entertainment industry (hint: you get asked to be Huggy Bear, not Starsky or Hutch) and the "slave state" of Mexicans: "If Kevin Hart is…

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Apollo Brown is a producer with a rep. When you check out an Apollo Brown album, you know what you are going to get: dusty samples, boom-bap drums, dope beats. He has already worked with a who’s who of top MCs, from O.C. and Guilty Simpson to Chino XL and Ghostface Killah. Now he has teamed up with…

I t’s strange when two filmmakers can hardly stand to look at one of their movies. Especially when that film was as lucrative — and, for me, as beautifully sinister — as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . So when I met George Lucas in December, in advance of the release of Red Tails , I asked…

In 1984, the Motion Picture Association of America introduced its first new content rating since its “G, PG, R, and X” classification scheme replaced the Hays Code in 1968. The PG-13 was meant to signal a strong note of caution to parents that a movie might be too intense or troubling for some…

It was late April when the sole surviving location of Kim’s Video & Music announced that it was closing its doors for good. The beloved New York City video store minichain already had dwindled from four branches to one, but the First Avenue location managed to hang on for nearly five years after…

No other hip-hop group has had such a combination of the dodgy concept called street cred and unapologetically poetic, emotional writing. Illustration by Stanley Chow The most surprising thing about “A Better Tomorrow,” the latest album from New York’s Wu-Tang Clan, is not that it is generally…

I t was raining in Los Angeles last Thursday morning. The drops fell as steadily as they ever do here, but even walking through an open-air mall, I was glad. Rarely does the weather pull me into movie theaters anymore, but considering I was about to spend the next 12 hours in one, I preferred it to…

The Supreme Court is finally getting schooled in hip-hop. Music is not a threat to safety. Tupac Shakur, killed in 1996 drive-by shooting, remains one of the most influential hip-hop artists. (Photo: Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press, 1994) In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in…

Grantland editor Robert Mays loves going to the movies. January and February, or Dumpuary, as we’ve dubbed the post-holiday, pre-Oscar period when Hollywood disposes of its least promising fare, is a terrible time to see movies. And so, in an attempt to break him the way Kevin Spacey broke that fat…

With words such as ‘organism’, ‘cell’, ‘fabric’ and ‘regeneration’, Japan’s Metabolist movement articulated a distinct and idiosyncratic aesthetic for their projects and defined a new architectural vocabulary. Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is an exemplary expression of this vocabulary. However, from…

What exactly is it about the controversy-baiting, aggressive, indispensable taxi app that pisses so many people off? (Hint: It’s not the bullying, the bro culture, or the surge pricing.) By Bobbie Johnson Photographs by Richard Petrucci oberto Chicas doesn’t use Uber anymore. Actually, he doesn’t do…

Given the millions of albums “Weird Al” Yankovic has sold, and the fact that, at long last, he’s scored his first Billboard No. 1 record with 2014’s Mandatory Fun , few would argue his status as the most popular musical parodist of his generation. But his cinematic success has been less commercially…

If you were going to smuggle something in, it would be dresses and bras.

Originally published June 4, 1992, in the Dallas Observer . Reprinted here with permission from the author, who has also provided an afterword about the response to her story. I have one of the few jobs where the first thing people ask about is penises. Well, Reggie Jackson was my first. And yes, I…

Amidst chaos in Ferguson, Killer Mike and El-P come together in perfect harmony Hours before Run the Jewels were set to hit the stage last night, their tour bus sat stranded on the side of the road somewhere off in the sticks. Killer Mike may have sat on the same side of the bus as El-P and Despot…

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You’ve probably seen videos of unannounced or cancelled games. Not necessarily the older retro stuff, but more recent things like Star Wars Battlefront 3 or Stranglehold 2 . Did you know there’s a keen, and occasionally zealous, culture of collectors and traders passing these things around? What…

A decade after Slacker put director Richard Linklater on the map—and helped alter the independent landscape in general—he made Waking Life , another loose assemblage of philosophers, eccentrics, and other random sketches and anecdotes. But this time, he looked to animation to give form to both the…

One night in October, before the media critic Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a speech at Utah State University, someone e-mailed the school, threatening to commit mass murder. “This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history, and I’m giving you a chance to stop it,” the…

The Upper Hand is where Grantland staffers pit unsuspecting entertainers against one another to determine which one currently has a greater grip on the hearts and minds of America. It’s a long way of saying X > Y. It may seem reductive, or even unnecessarily competitive, to put our gentle creators…

November 25, 2014 istock What do Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, Titanic, Anchorman, 22 Jump Street , and more than 200 other films and TV shows have in common ? Not much besides the one and only Wilhelm…

The latest label comes from a long line of linguistic difficulties It was every record store clerk’s biggest headache. The customer was in his late teens, perhaps early 20s. He was dressed in baggy raver jeans, with a skate brand t-shirt and baseball cap. All crisp and new. He was looking for a…