15 Great 2019 Movies You Can Watch Right Now
Last week, we ran our list of the 25 best movies of the year (and it’s right here, ICYMI), and it was a tough list to make – this year offered even more great films than usual, particularly in the indie and foreign space. So, in lieu of our…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: James Thurber on Journalism
This month marked the 125th anniversary of the birth of essayist, novelist, and all-around with James Thurber. To celebrate the occasion, HarperCollins has published Thurber's Collected Fables (edited by Michael J. Rosen), which combines an…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The Top 25 Movies of 2019
I’ve been making this list for this site for eight years now (look it up!) and I can’t recall it ever being harder to make – or easier. It was harder in the sense that 2019 was an incredibly strong year for new movies, especially for a soft touch…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Let's Talk About the Grossest Scene in 'Bombshell'
Bombshell, Jay Roach’s dramatization of the fall of Fox News head Roger Ailes, went into wide release last weekend, propelled by a good early showing (at least for its actors) in the year-end awards: two Golden Globe nominations (Charlize Theron for…
Film | By Jason Bailey
15 Great 2019 Movies You Can Watch Right Now
Last week, we ran our list of the 25 best movies of the year (and it’s right here, ICYMI), and it was a tough list to make – this year offered even more great films than usual, particularly in the indie and foreign space. So, in lieu of our…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: James Thurber on Journalism
This month marked the 125th anniversary of the birth of essayist, novelist, and all-around with James Thurber. To celebrate the occasion, HarperCollins has published Thurber's Collected Fables (edited by Michael J. Rosen), which combines an…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Heartwarming Photos of Polar Bears and Cubs
It's the holiday season and it's crazy cold, so how about warming your heart with some pictures of mama polar bears cuddling and nuzzling their cubs? They come to us (via Bored Panda) from Canadian photographer David Hemmings, who tells us, when…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: A Heartfelt Apology from the @FakeThemePark
This time last year, we were telling you all about the exploits of former social media manager Jason Ginsburg, who turned his successful @FakeThemePark Twitter account into a book. Well, now there's a sequel, and we're here to share a bit of that…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 15 Best Holiday Movies to Stream This Week (Plus ‘The Two Popes’)
Unsurprisingly, since the customary Tuesday release day falls on Christmas Eve this year, there’s not much on the new release shelf; if you’re buying something, they figure, you’ve already bought it. So instead, let’s seize upon the season, and…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: Sex Ed for Fairy Tale Princesses?
Everybody loves a good foreword - you know, those bite-sized introductory essays, in which an expert or admirer or maybe even just some random celebrity tells you all about their very personal connection with the book you're about to read.…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Let's Talk About the Grossest Scene in 'Bombshell'
Bombshell, Jay Roach’s dramatization of the fall of Fox News head Roger Ailes, went into wide release last weekend, propelled by a good early showing (at least for its actors) in the year-end awards: two Golden Globe nominations (Charlize Theron for…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Stunning Photos Capture the Flight Paths of Birds
Catalan photographer Xavi Bou was always fascinated by birds - and figured out a unique way to photograph their flight patterns. "One day I asked myself what kind of trail the birds would leave in the sky if that were possible," he told My Modern…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The Top 25 Movies of 2019
I’ve been making this list for this site for eight years now (look it up!) and I can’t recall it ever being harder to make – or easier. It was harder in the sense that 2019 was an incredibly strong year for new movies, especially for a soft touch…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: The Origins and Outcomes of #MeToo
It's easy to feel hopeless. We're knee-deep in a backslide into fascism and lawlessness, and structural change seems all but impossible. But in historical moments like this, as they say, you can't know your future if you don't know your past - and a…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 6 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Ad Astra,’ ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’
If there were any justice in this world, this week’s big 4K and Blu-ray release would’ve been one of the year’s biggest hits. Alas. Also this week: two terrific new indies (one foreign, one doc) and a forgotten ‘90s gem on disc, and a couple of…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Striking Sculptures Capture Intense Emotions via Scrap Metal
British artist Penny Hardy works in hard, cold materials, yet uses them to convey warmth and emotion. Her creations, life-sized sculptures dramatizing the most extreme of human emotions, are crafted (according to her website) "from found bits and…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Awesome Art Inspired by 'Weird Al' Yankovic
Over the course of a four-plus decade career as pop's premier parodist, "Weird Al" Yankovic has sold more than 12 million albums, earning five Grammys, four gold records, and six platinum. But this month, he's receiving the ultimater recognition of…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Back to Macao: Flavorwire's IFFAM 2019 Diary
Attending a film festival in Macao, China, isn’t really all that different than going to one in Park City or Toronto. The food is better, to be sure. And the filmmakers and stars stand awkwardly in front of the audience before the movie rather than…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: How Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino Made 'Dog Day Afternoon'
Few movie buffs would argue that Sidney Lumet – whose output included such classics as 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict – was one of the finest filmmakers of the 1970s (one of the most important eras in the medium’s…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 7 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,’ ‘Hustlers’
Not one, not two, but three of the year’s best movies hit disc or streaming this week, which would be exciting enough on its own. But we’ve also got a restored ‘80s gem, one of the great ‘70s dramas, a new documentary movie lovers will adore, and a…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Noir-Infused Images of Snowy Japan
Finnish street photographer Teemu Jarvinen draws inspiration from the traditions of cyberpunk and film noir, so when he took his camera to Sapporo, Japan earlier this year, he inserted those influences into his images of the city's snowy…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Haunting Photos of an Abandoned Italian Madhouse
When German-born photographer Andy Schwetz visited the Manicomio di Racconigi, an abandoned insane asylum in Italy, he was struck by the horror of the procedures performed there, from electroshock therapy to experimental operations. He channeled…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: How They Made TV's Most Iconic Opening Credits
The Brady Bunch is one of the strangest success stories in the history of television, running five modestly-rated and poorly-reviewed seasons from 1969 to 1974, then becoming a (sometimes ironic) hit via its seemingly endless reruns - resulting in…
TV | By Flavorwire Staff
Incredible, Photorealistic Paintings of Tattooed Women
Agnieszka Nienartowicz's work is a series of illusions and contradictions, in the best possible way: she crafts what appear, at first glance, to be photographs of women with tattoos of classic works of art. Only on closer examination does it become…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 6 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Ready or Not,’ ‘The Report’
One of the year’s best movies pops up on Amazon Prime this week, and a delicious horror/action/comedy leads the new disc releases. Plus, a first-rate bio-doc, two new Criterion additions, and an always-rewatchable Best Picture winner returns to…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Flavorwire's Guide to Movies You Need to See in December
The end of the year is upon us, prompting a real embarrassment of riches at the movies – as if there weren’t alreadytoo many great movies (The Irishman, Knives Out, Marriage Story, Honey Boy, The Report, etc.) to clear time out of your busy schedule…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Flavorwire’s Ultimate Gift Guide for the Pop Culture Aficionado In Your Life
Thanksgiving week is upon us again, and you know what that means: it’s time to start thinking about some gift-giving. (Or maybe not! Things are tight all over, that’s undeniable, and if the holidays have always been overtly commercialized, they seem…
Books | By Jason Bailey
Awesome Art Inspired by Your Favorite Holiday Movies
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and you know what that means (aside from family get-togethers and eating too much and ill-advised shopping expeditions): it's time to watch some holiday movies. Of course, our pop culture-loving friends at Gallery1988 are…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 6 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘The Irishman,’ ‘All About Eve’
You can tell the Thanksgiving holidays are upon us, for two reasons: 1) Netflix is unleashing its biggest movie to date, with a three-and-a-half-hour running time that’s perfect for post-Thanksgiving nothing-to-do time; and 2) several of our…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Adorable Photos of Dancers and Their Dogs
Back in January of 2017, photographers Kelly Pratt Kreidich and Ian Kreidich hit upon a new idea. For years, they'd specialized in photographing professional dancers; what if, just for fun, they tried photographing some of those dancers with the…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
'Knives Out' is a Giddily Entertaining Holiday Feast
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out opens with the image of a giant manor house. Strings surge loudly on the soundtrack; hounds run from the estate in slow-motion. This, folks, is how you open your movie – with big, broad, theatrical gestures, acknowledging…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: Elena Ferrante on the Magic of Mothers
When novelist Elena Ferrante embarked on a year of writing weekly columns for The Guardian, she saw it as a writing challenge - to work as, in her words, "an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that—if I have the will…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Awesome Pop Culture-Inspired Holiday Tree Toppers
Somehow, the holiday season is upon us again, and while we would normally eschew seasonal posts until at least Thanksgiving, we have to make an exception for our friends at Gallery1988. You see, the latest show at the pop culture-obsessed L.A.…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 6 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Blinded By the Light,’ ‘Dora and the Lost City of Gold’
Three lightweight but undeniably engaging late-summer releases are out this week on disc and demand, along with a welcome Blu-ray release (and Criterion Collection blessing) for one of last year’s best. All that and a stylish crime film worth…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: A Freewheeling Dive into Postwar America
In the new novel Big Bang (out this week in paperback from Little, Brown), author David Bowman peeks into the real-life history of America in the 1950s, cheerfully intermingling real events and figures with imaginary intersections, crafting an…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Iconic, Melancholy Panels From 'Peanuts' Comics
On October 2, 1950, a little comic strip debuted in seven newspapers and proceeded, in the years that followed, to change the form - and, in its own small way, the world. Charles Schultz's "Peanuts" turns 70 next year, and the celebration is…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Gorgeous Photos Masterfully Deconstruct Social Stereotypes
One of the most elemental but essential functions of photography is to cast things in a new light - to help us see people, places, and things in unexpected ways. This is the explicit purpose of "A Glitch in the System, deconstructing stereotypes," a…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
What Disney+ Really Tells Us About Disney
And, like that, it’s all there. Tuesday brought the launch of Disney+, the cultural behemoth’s long-promised, much-hyped streaming service – delivering, well, most of the feature films, TV movies, and shows from the company’s decades-long reign.…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: A New, Epic Thriller from Dean Koontz
Few names in modern publishing are as widely recognized as Dean Koontz, whose novels have sold over 500 million copies to date in 38 languages. Fourteen of his novels have topped the New York Times best-seller list. And now, at 74, he's embarking on…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 9 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘The Farewell,’ ‘Good Boys’
Two summer sleepers hit disc this week, and both are worth your time. And that’s not all – we’ve got two must-see indies, a new release of an animated classic, an unsung ‘90s gem from Criterion, and a triple feature of ace ‘70s crime movies from KL…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Disturbing Works of Modern Surrealism
Though the Surrealist movement is over a hundred years old, the aesthetics and ideas that so invigorated its creators remain strikingly relevant to contemporary artists. Eleven such artists - working in the media of painting, sculpture, and…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Hilarious Action Figures from Grown-Up Movies and TV
Since the fortune reaped by George Lucas following the release of Star Wars, the official action figure has become a standby of any commercial-friendly blockbuster movie or television show, launching entire subsets of geekdom (and lucrative revenue…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The Fundamental Conundrum of 'Doctor Sleep'
In retrospect, my first mistake was probably re-watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining the night before my press screening of Doctor Sleep, Mike Flanagan’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s follow-up novel. I was explicitly encouraged to by the…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: 'Girl on Girl' and the Female Gaze
Practically since its advent, fashion and art photography has been dominated by the male gaze - with women presented, and often objectified, by male photographers, and seen only as vessels for their pleasure and desire. But in recent years, a new…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 9 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,’ ‘The Nightingale’
It’s a real dud week on disc – aside from our marquee title, the big new releases are Hobbs & Shaw, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and The Kitchen – so we’re dipping deep in to the streaming services, which have added a number of tasty titles at the…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Inventive Images Capture Amusing 'Coincidences' on NYC Streets
“In New York, you are constantly faced with this very urgent, quick decision that you have to make about every 20 minutes," David Cross once explained. "About every 20 minutes, immediately, you have to go, [gasp] 'Oh my God. Do I look at the most…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Flavorwire's Guide to Indie Movies You Need to See in November
We’re closing in on the end of the year, and this month’s indie offerings are about what you’d expect: a lot (and I mean a lot) of documentaries, a couple of obscurities, a few high-profile titles with awards aspirations, and plenty of Adam Driver.…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: A New Slant on the Coming-of-Age Memoir
In her scorching new memoir Ordinary Girls (out now from Algonquin Books), author Jaquira Diaz takes on the coming-of-age story from her unique, queer Puerto Rican perspective - tackling racial and sexual identity, domestic abuse, poverty, mental…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Iconic Horror Movie Posters Reimagined in Fuzzy Felt
Halloween is but a day away, and if you're like us, you've got a full queue of horror classics ready for viewing. And the best horror movies are so scary, so beloved, that we not only celebrate the films themselves - we celebrate the imagery of…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 12 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Dolemite Is My Name,’ ‘Godzilla’
I don't wanna overstate what an incredible week this is for home media, but let me put it like this: Criterion hits #1000 with a massive box set, #999 is a stone cold masterpiece, Netflix has two A+ new releases streaming, KL Studio Classics has two…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Famed Photographers Share Their Favorite 'Hidden' Images
You don't just need technical skills or good equipment to be a great photographer - you also have to have the right eye, a way of seeing the world that others haven't. This idea is at the center of 'Hidden,' a new, curated series from Magnum Photos…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Creative Photos of Hand-Knitted Environmental Camouflage
You don't often hear about artistic collaborations between photographers and knitters, but that's exactly what Joseph Ford and Nina Dodd have created with their "Invisible Jumpers" project, collected in a new book (out in the U.S. on November 25)…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: A Fresh Look at 'Joan of Arc'
Few figures have been as lionized by popular culture as Joan of Arc - so much so that it's become difficult to separate fact from mythology. This is one of the many achievements of Joan of Arc, Helen Castor's best-selling, meticulously researched…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Stunning Photos Painstakingly Recreate Iconic Portraits
Photographer Joongwon Jeong specializes in something rare and wonderful: he takes portraits of the past - in paintings, in busts, in photographs - and recreates them in photos so meticulous and realistic, they're hard to tell from the real thing. “A…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 8 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘The Art of Self-Defense,’ ‘The Laundromat’
A pair of tiny but powerful spring indies, landing on (respectively) disc and Hulu, lead up this week’s disc and streaming guide. Also worth a watch: a pair of sexy/goofy action/comedies, an anniversary edition of a beloved sci-fi spoof, new…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Flavorwire's Tallgrass Film Festival 2019 Diary
I always try to make the journey back to my hometown of Wichita, Kansas not just because the Tallgrass Film Festival is one of the great under-the-radar fests in the country, but because it gives me a chance to catch up – their savvy programmers are…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Stunning Photos of Patterns in Architecture
Photographer Dirk Bakker, aka @macenzo, is one of our essential Instagram follows. The Amsterdam-based shutterbug's specialty is design; his inventive eye captures and frames shapes, colors, and patterns in architecture (and, sometimes, just in the…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: A Lively Look at 19th Century NYC Theater
In the new novel How Beautiful They Were, author Boston Teran - the anonymous writer behind twelve acclaimed books - continues a tradition of looking at contemporary themes through the lens of historical fiction with this story, set in the bustling…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Astonishing Images of Well-Dressed Dancers in Flight
In their new book The Style of Movement: Fashion and Dance, photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory - the husband-and-wife team behind NYC Dance Project - follow up their collection The Art of Movement with a collection of stirring images that…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The 6 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘El Camino,’ ‘Mike Wallace Is Here’
One of our favorite TV shows gets a straight-to-Netfix sequel this week, and one of the year’s best documentaries lands on disc. And over on the catalogue side, we’ve got two silent classics and two horror/comedies – one beloved, one all but lost.…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Flavorwire's New York Film Festival 2019 Diary
The 57th New York Film Festival drew to close over the weekend, proving (once again) to be one of the country’s most reliable surveys of the best of contemporary cinema – a handful of premieres, an abundance of must-see titles from other fests…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Iconographic Art Inspired by Pop Culture Characters
Dave Quiggle's "Icons of Affection" is borne of an ingenious idea: since so many of us treat pop culture as a religion anyway, why not pay tribute to the characters of film and television with the visual langage of religious iconography? And thus we…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
'Gemini Man': A Bad Movie, Boosted by Bad Technology
“It’s like watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic,” Clay Verris (Clive Owen) fumes in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, and it’s almost a dare to make a movie this bad, and put a line like that in it, and not expect to have it quoted back to you.…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: A Witchy Story of Colonial New England
The witching season is upon us, and Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods (out this week in paperback from Little, Brown and Company) is the perfect October read: a story of witchcraft in colonial America, in which a law-abiding Puritan…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 7 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Toy Story 4,’ ‘Midsommar’
This week’s big new disc releases are buzzy summer titles that couldn’t be further apart: the latest installment in a long-running family franchise, and a brutal slab of broad-daylight horror. Let’s take a look at those, and some catalogue titles…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Captivating Photos of 'Everyday Train Life' in Japan
Pak Han is a street photographer in the truest sense of the phrase: he photographs daily urban life, capturing unguarded and unposed moments of people going about their business (or pleasure). "I’ve been taking street photos in Japan, mostly in…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Famous Portraits, Meticulously Recreated for John Malkovich
One of the most enduring scenes (and weirdest, which is saying something) from Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich is the surreal "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich" sequence, in which the peculiar portal at the center of the story doubles back on…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: Expert Advice From Historical Women
What if you could go to Cleopatra for dating advice? Ask Frida Kahlo about maintaining your independence in a relationship? Get Marilyn Monroe's thoughts on female pleasure? We Came First (out now from Laurence King Publishing), the insightful,…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Flavorwire's Guide to Indie Movies You Need to See in October
Fall has fallen, festivals have come and gone, and Oscar Buzz ™ is in the air! Yes, folks, good movie season is full swing, and this October offers up an embarrassment of riches, from Cannes and TIFF winners to genre documentaries to welcome…
Film | By Jason Bailey
The 8 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Maiden’
A summer smash and a sleeper hit documentary are the “new” of this week’s new releases, but the big news is over on the 4K shelf – where, just in time for Halloween, three creepy classics are getting the big UltraHD upgrade. All those, and more,…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Funny, Inventive Art Inspired by Your Favorite Cult Movies
If you spend any time at all on our site, you know what fans we are of Gallery1988, the pop culture-obsessed Los Angeles art gallery. For years now, their rotating collection of solo shows and themed exhibitions have sprung from their signature…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Scorsese's Gangsters Come of Age in 'The Irishman'
“You don’t know how fast time goes by ‘till you get there,” Frank tells the nurse, late in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which, make no mistake, is the work of a filmmaker in his twilight years. Like John Huston’s The Dead or Ingmar Bergman’s…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Stunning New Illustrations of Classic Books by Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler
Few authors get our pulses racing like Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler, and luckily enough, our friends at The Folio Society have just released gorgeous new editions of important works by both. Their release of Atwood's 2003 speculative…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
Book Excerpt: An Investigation of 'The Human Cost of Fighting in Hockey'
Former Washington Capital Stephen Peat and former New York Ranger Dale Purinton decided at an early age that they would do anything to play hockey at the highest level - to prove that they were worth it, not only as hockey players, but as people.…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff
The 10 Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: ‘Between Two Ferns,’ ‘Yesterday’
This week’s new releases are mixed efforts offering minor pleasures – worth seeing, but perhaps after the week’s catalogue titles, which include a Chaplin classic, an ‘80s masterpiece, a film noir essential, and more. Let’s dive in:
Film | By Jason Bailey
Rare, Valuable 'Batman' Props and Costumes Up for Auction
The Internet celebrated "Batman Day" over the weekend, and what a relief it was to finally, at long last, talk about Batman online! Anyway, now that all of you Bat-fans have gone back into your Bat-caves to secretly adore the Caped Crusader until…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
Painterly Photographs of Luminous Lavender Fields
Valensole is a small commune in southeastern France's Provence, best known for its plateau, its truffles, and its lavender. Visual artist Samir Belhamra (who first came to our attention via My Modern Met) was captivated by the latter - particularly…
Art | By Flavorwire Staff
The Fierce Emotional Urgency of 'Ad Astra'
My phone buzzed in my pocket as the lights went down at the press screening, and I quietly chastised myself – I usually remember to put it on airplane mode before then, both as a courtesy to my fellow moviegoers and to ensure that I’ll take in the…
Film | By Jason Bailey
Book Excerpt: Writers Grapple With Their Parents in a Thoughtful New Anthology
One of the most disturbing moments of adulthood - and most, if not all, of us have it - is that terrible flash when we react to something without thinking, and realize we've done so exactly as our parents would. In the new anthology Apple, Tree:…
Books | By Flavorwire Staff