Who is Taylor Swift’s heir apparent? Her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” offers an answer. It’s Taylor Swift. Her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” ended with the cautionary “Clara Bow,” an allegory that seemed to suggest her tenure atop the cultural mainstream was inherited from stars of the past, like the namechecked…
A stretch of a waterfront trail in the Florida Gulf Coast community of Clearwater is being renamed to honor the mustachioed, headscarf-wearing wrestling giant Hulk Hogan, who called the city home and died earlier this year. Florida residents and tourists alike will be able to memorialize “the Hulkster” by soaking up the sun along the…
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — The curtain has been drawn. The stage lights are on. It’s time for “The Life of a Showgirl.” For Taylor Swift’s most dedicated audience, a new album means new opportunities to decode Easter eggs in her lyrics and music videos. The pop superstar’s 12th studio album has no…
Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” isn’t what you think it is, especially if you think it’s a movie about a British guy who thinks his typewriter is the tops. “The Smashing Machine” would seem to bear all the hallmarks of something grittier, darker and more disturbing than it is. It’s the solo directorial debut of…
NEW YORK — In 1983, six thieves muscled their way into a warehouse near Heathrow Airport, expecting to find a large sum of foreign currency. They got much more than they bargained for — 26 million pounds worth of gold bars. What happened in the days and years next is the subject of PBS’ “Masterpiece”…
Filmmaker Raoul Peck uses George Orwell’s writings to weave together a biographical portrait of the author and a dispiriting picture of power and truth in the modern world in “Orwell: 2+2=5.” He’s hardly the first to connect the dots between Orwell’s prophetic writings and the current state of things — remember, sales for “Nineteen Eighty-Four”…
NEW YORK — It’s been eight years since Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from acting and said he wanted to “explore the world in a different way.” But the big-screen absence of the actor many would peg as the greatest one alive ends with “Anemone,” a new film directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The…
NEW YORK — A New York City rapper who joined President Donald Trump during a campaign rally last year has been sentenced to five years behind bars after he admitted he used earnings from his music career to fuel gang violence in Brooklyn. Sheff G, whose legal name is Michael Williams, also must serve five…
LONDON — Literary biographies vie with explorations of extremism, slavery and European wolves on the shortlist for Britain’s leading nonfiction book prize. The six finalists announced Thursday for the 50,000 pound ($67,000) Baillie Gifford Prize include “The Boundless Deep,” a biography of poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Richard Holmes, Frances Wilson’s “Electric Spark,” about Scottish…
It is often said of our greatest actors that they could compellingly recite the phone book. There’s no doubt, just to continue that thought for a moment, that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of our greatest living actors — perhaps truly the best of them all. And so the first and most important thing to say…
