Need a great book to read, album to listen to, or TV show to get hooked on? The Flavorwire team is here to help: in this weekly feature, our editorial staffers recommend the cultural object or experience they’ve enjoyed most in the past seven days. Click through for our picks, and tell us what you’ve been loving in the comments.
Spotlight
I wouldn’t call Spotlight an uplifting holiday film, but it’s an inspiring one in its own way. The cinematic exploration of the Boston Globe’s investigation into abuse cover-ups by the Catholic authorities in the area is the rare procedural that’s genuinely gripping without being overblown. Avoiding the perils of exploitative territory, the film shows just how difficult it was for the small team of reporters digging into a pattern of abuse that they thought was just a handful of priests, then a larger handful, and then they realized was a full-blown epidemic. Their project woke up the world to a major problem, but also shook their faith, frayed their emotions, and threatened their positions in Boston’s tight-knit Catholic community. — Sarah Seltzer, Editor-at-Large
The Next Picture Show
Hot take: The Dissolve was a great website, and we miss it a lot. Luckily, former staffers have reunited to bring us The Next Picture Show, a film podcast (brought to us by Filmspotting, which is fast becoming a mini-network in its own right) that distills the short-lived site to its essence. The Dissolve managed to combine well-informed takes on contemporary movies with considerations of older ones that defied the logic of anniversaries or timely pegs. The Next Picture Show combines those strengths by examining a new release—Spotlight and The Hunger Games, so far—through the lens of a classic. Between this and Channel 33, Bill Simmons’ audio home for former Grantlanders, The Next Picture Show is a glimmer of hope at the end of a rough year for smart, online criticism. — Alison Herman, Associate Editor
SMOOTH TALK, Laura Dern, 1985, (c)International Spectrafilm
Smooth Talk
Laura Dern is endlessly good and scarily convincing in this modest 1985 coming-of-age drama, recently upgraded to Blu-ray by Olive Films. A production of American Playhouse (the PBS anthology that made much of ‘80s indie cinema possible), it won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the third Sundance Film Festival, and serves as an astute portrait of mall-hanging mid-‘80s youth culture (aside from insisting teenagers were listening to James Taylor). Director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole (adapting a Joyce Carol Oates short story) capture the exhilaration of figuring out the power of one’s sexuality, and the clumsily exciting flirtations and make-outs that are part and parcel of that moment; their skeleton key is Dern, then 18, who manages to look gawky one moment and luminous the next. Treat Williams is also aces, as an older would-be suitor who faces off with her in an extended, pseudo-seductions sequence (something like 20 minutes of screen time) in which he slides from charming rogue to troubling predator and back again, pushing and pulling on this young woman who finds herself repulsed and attracted, all at once. — Jason Bailey, Film Editor
The Man in The High Castle
Despite our reviewer’s protests, I found The Man In The High Castle to be utterly engrossing. At a time when TV aims to sweep us up in a mythos, rather than simply follow a story, it teases us in with small, fascinating details —after the war, the Germans and Japanese split control of the U.S.: Germany everything east of the Rockies, while the Japanese rule the west coast— that brings us just a bit closer to experiencing to a bygone generation’s worst nightmare. Though the story itself drags in spots, The Man in the High Castle excels at using its quiet moments to highlight that the real differences between a life under democratic and fascist rule wouldn’t be so much different, except for the small, tragic moments that cumulate into the crushing weight of a life oppressed. — Michael Epstein, Editorial Apprentice
Dane Terry’s Bird in the House at Pangea
Usually you are doing someone a favor when you agree, on short notice, to accompany them to their friend’s show. But it turned out my visiting pal was doing me a favor when she took me to the small backroom performance space at Pangea, in Manhattan’s East Village, Monday night to see Dane Terry perform a stripped-down, solo version of his show Bird in the House. It’s something between a song cycle and a one-man musical, with Terry (who we’ve featured on Flavorwire before) crossing sounds and genres in telling a dark coming-of-age story from rural America. Bridging the songs with spoken passages, he vividly evokes a hospital, a factory, a public pool lit for just one night by lights brought in from the local high school football field. Aside from the diverse (and often satisfyingly diegetic) music, it’s the characters Terry embodies, from a young Dane to his quippy mother to a mysterious “doctor with a gun,” that make Bird in the House so lively. In January the show comes to the Public with a full band, for the Under the Radar Festival. — Judy Berman, Editor-in-Chief