Taylor Swift Cinema: The Last Global Pact Before We All Implode By Our Correspondent in the Smoldering Ruins of the Multiplex PARIS—Somewhere between the 19th arrondissement and the afterlife, a 34-year-old pop deity has done what the UN, Davos, and COP28 could not: convene 150 sovereign nations to sit still for two hours without a…
June Squibb, the 94-year-old Nebraskan who has spent most of her life politely waiting for the planet to notice she could act, has finally become a global phenomenon. One wonders if the Earth simply ran out of younger people willing to risk their hips on a speeding mobility scooter for art. In May, Squibb completed…
Michael Bay: America’s Loudest Cultural Export and the World’s Guilty Pleasure Bylines from Seoul to São Paulo keep asking the same question: how did a man whose films detonate more ordinance per minute than most medium-sized wars become the most reliable ambassador of U.S. soft power since Coca-Cola started putting names on bottles? The answer,…
Bollywoes: How the World Learns to Love and Loathe India’s Glittering Guilt Machine By Our Correspondent in a Safe House Somewhere Between Bandra and Netflix HQ If the global film industry were a bar at closing time, Hollywood would be the loud American bragging about his IPO, Nollywood the Nigerian hustler selling you miracle watches,…
Woody Allen, that diminutive neurotic with horn-rimmed glasses and a lifetime subscription to existential dread, has somehow become the global Rorschach test for the late-capitalist psyche. From Seoul to Seville, his face—equal parts guilty conscience and self-deprecating punchline—adorns subway posters for 1979’s Manhattan next to ads for K-pop comebacks and oat-milk lattes. It’s as if…
Zoe Saldaña: Hollywood’s Favorite Alien, Globalism’s Accidental Poster Girl PARIS—Somewhere between the popcorn-scented multiplexes of suburban Ohio and the neon-drenched midnight shows of Seoul, Zoe Saldaña has quietly become the most profitable non-terrestrial in cinematic history. Her cumulative box-office take—north of $14 billion—doesn’t just dwarf the GDP of several island nations; it also proves, in…
**When Titans Tango: The Global Implications of Anderson-DiCaprio’s Hypothetical Ballet** The international film community found itself in collective cardiac arrest this week when whispers emerged that cinema’s most meticulous auteur, Paul Thomas Anderson, might deign to collaborate with Hollywood’s last true movie star, Leonardo DiCaprio. The news spread faster than a cryptocurrency crash, sending film…
**The Global Bale-Out: How One Welshman Became Hollywood’s Favorite Emotional Refugee** In an era when nations erect walls faster than teenagers build TikTok followings, Christian Bale has made a career of transcending borders—though usually while running from explosions or toward Oscar nominations. The Welsh-born actor’s latest metamorphosis in “The Pale Blue Eye” reminds us that…
The Batman: A Noir Valentine to a Planet That Prefers Superficial Heroes GOTHAM—Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of gas prices that could ransom a small monarchy, the world decided what it really needed was another re-telling of the Wayne trauma-industrial complex. Enter Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” a three-hour meditation on sulk,…
Regal Cinema: The Fall of a Global Colossus, or How the World Learned to Love Watching Alone The curtain finally dropped on Regal Cinema this month, and the planet responded with the same polite applause it reserves for a cancelled flight: a collective shrug, a swipe to the next screen. Once the largest cinema chain…
By the time Cineworld’s creditors stopped circling like polite vultures, the company had already become a global ghost story told in surround sound. Once the planet’s second-largest cinema chain, it now exists largely as a cautionary tale: a multinational popcorn empire that mistook cheap debt for destiny and believed audiences would keep turning up just…
The Crown Jewels of Popcorn: Regal Cinemas and the Royal Mess of Post-Pandemic Leisure From a certain angle, the neon “REGAL” sign still looks imperial—an afterglow of American soft power projected onto cracked sidewalks from Leicester Square to Louisville. Yet step inside any of its 500-odd auditoriums and you’ll find the empire has been reduced…
