Josh Brolin’s Chin Has More Passport Stamps Than Your LinkedIn Profile By Our Bureau of Expensive Mid-Life Crises, Geneva When the World Economic Forum wants a mood board for “late-capitalist gravitas,” it apparently just air-drops a 4K still of Josh Brolin squinting at a green screen. From the neon sewers of Seoul to the tax…
Paul Thomas Anderson: The Last American Auteur Selling Existential Dread to a Streaming Planet Byline: Dave’s Locker International Desk If you want to understand how the 21st-century world consumes anxiety, buy a ticket—assuming your local multiplex hasn’t been converted into a Bitcoin mine—to a Paul Thomas Anderson film. From the oil-slick nihilism of There Will…
Leonardo DiCaprio: the last global movie star who still pretends climate change is a side gig PARIS—In a world where most screen idols have traded mystique for Instagram Q&As, Leonardo DiCaprio remains stubbornly cinematic: a man who can charter a private jet to pick up an environmental award and still be applauded for his carbon…
The last time the planet’s collective pulse spiked in unison, it wasn’t the Fed raising rates or a North Korean missile test—it was the trailer for “The Beekeeper,” in which Jason Statham, age-melting like a budget Bond, detonates a call-center scam ring with the moral clarity of a man who’s never waited on hold with…
Vince Vaughn, the 6-foot-5 human reminder that the 1990s never really ended, has lately been spotted on diplomatic red carpets from Berlin to Bangkok. This is less a career pivot than a symptom of our times: when the world tilts toward chaos, it apparently appoints a fast-talking Midwesterner as its comic relief attaché. The man…
BILLY BOB THORNTON: AMERICA’S SOUTHERN-FRIED EXPORT OF MENACE, MISANTHROPY, AND MISPLACED ROMANCE By the time you finish reading this sentence, Billy Bob Thornton will have been married in at least one additional time zone. The man who once wore Angelina Jolie’s blood in a vial around his neck has become, against all odds, the United…
Jordan Peele’s horror is the only American export that terrifies both Beijing’s censors and Davos’ keynote speakers—proof that fear, like debt, is borderless. While Washington still pretends soft power means jazz diplomacy and Marvel post-credit scenes, Peele quietly weaponized popcorn anxiety into a global mirror. The result? A Ugandan film student in Kampala cites Get…
Tron: Ares and the Global Gladiator Complex By “Peregrine” Wu, filing from a windowless hotel in Incheon with a minibar that still charges in Deutsche Marks When Disney finally wheeled Tron: Ares onto the D23 stage last August, the applause sounded less like fan-boy ecstasy and more like the relieved sigh of an empire discovering…
The Last Picture Palace: AMC Theatres and the Global Art of Selling Popcorn to the Bomb Shelter Crowd By Dave’s Locker International Desk It takes a special kind of optimism—some would say delusion—to charge fifteen U.S. dollars for a ticket in a world where the air itself occasionally becomes flammable. Yet there stands AMC Theatres,…
The Spy Who Never Retired: How James Bond Became the Last Remaining Global Soft-Power Superpower By Our Man in Geneva with the Hangover When the credits rolled on *No Time to Die* in 2021, MI6’s most flamboyant employee technically ceased to exist in the continuity—blown to a respectful, socially-distanced mist somewhere off the coast of…
Spike Lee Lands in Cannes, Reminding the Planet That America Still Can’t Sit Still By the time the Mediterranean sun had begun its daily assault on the Croisette, Spike Lee was already holding court outside the Palais, red-capped, gold-rimmed shades glinting like a warning flare. The occasion was ostensibly the Cannes premiere of his latest…
Paris, 14 July – The planet’s film critics have spent the past fortnight in a collective swoon over Emerald Fennell, a 38-year-old British polymath who appears to have cracked the algorithm for making audiences laugh, squirm, and question their moral compasses—all while wearing couture. From Cannes to Busan, from the Dolby Theatre to whatever windowless…
