The Muppets — specifically, the comedy-variety troupe featuring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo the Great, et. al. — are in their sixth decade of existence, but they have never been more perfectly deployed than in their first project together, the Seventies syndicated hit The Muppet Show. A …
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John Lewis declares that, during the 1960s, he was arrested “a few times.” Then the elder statesman and éminence grise of the civil rights movement pauses before correcting himself in front of the large Dallas crowd he’s addressing: “40 times…and since I’ve been in Congress, another five times. I’m probably …
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Diana Ingram loves quizzes, more than anything else in the world with the possible exception of her husband Charles and their children. Why does she care about them so much? “I like the idea, in a word of uncertainties, that something can be known,” she explains. The idea of definitive …
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The Painter and the Thief, Benjamin Ree’s documentary on a curious friendship, starts with a crime. The Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova is exhibiting her work in an Oslo gallery — she’s recently moved to Norway to live with her husband — when two paintings are stolen. They are worth roughly …
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Once upon a time, a young man wanted to come to America. He’d grown up in the rural countryside of Taiwan with his grandmother, occasionally having to hide in cupboards from soldiers looking for unregistered citizens. The boy was lonely, except for a girl he met in the fields. His …
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“She’s the bad guy here, not me,” Elena Richardson says of Mia Warren late in the new Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere. Elena — perfectly rich and blonde — cannot conceive of a story in which she is the villain. She considers herself a paragon of liberal virtue, someone who, …
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Note this documentary’s subtitle: Robbie Robertson and the Band. The name of this portrait of the legendary rock group — Once Were Brothers — comes from a cut off a 2019 Robertson solo album; the phrase exemplifies, in the singer-songwriter’s words, how he felt about the four other men who …
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For most of its 14 seasons and counting, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been a comedy that out-Seinfelds Seinfeld in its aversion to hugging and learning. The humor still works after all this time precisely because the Gang rarely grows or changes in any tangible way. But every now …
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There’s a distinct daughters-of-Carol-Clover vibe in the new remake of Black Christmas that hits you almost immediately — a kind of knowingness with a serrated edge that’s different from the meta-winks of something like Scream, or the in-joke camaraderie that happens when horror franchise entries start getting into the double …
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Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), the hero of HBO’s new comedy Los Espookys, is a study in contradictions. He dresses in Goth fashions and is obsessed with horror movies, but his most natural expression is a broad and welcoming smile. He starts up a business with best friends Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti) and …
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