There are too many reviews to read each month. To help you figure out what media to waste your life consuming, we've helpfully distilled a few of them for you.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
By Marc Snetiker/Entertainment Weekly
"As is the nature of this modern age of revivals and reboots, Cursed Child reads—maybe even exists—as a field guide of cameos and surprises. Each one bears delights and induces smiles, but the play's story device and its ability to summon up familiar faces feels like the likely reason Rowling and company felt the piece could and should in fact work now, here, in 2016."
tl;dr: Mama needs a new yacht.
Blink-182—California
by Kelefa Sanneh/The New Yorker
"But by the time Blink-182 released its third record, Enema of the State, in 1999, pop-punk was axiomatically understood as a sovereign entity, a subgenre that—unlike punk, which thrived on subverting notions of palatability—was deliberately engineered for mass pleasure."
tl;dr: "Pop-punk is the non-alcoholic beer of music."
Michael Jackson—Dangerous
by Jeff Weiss/Pitchfork
"In an interview given shortly after the release of Dangerous, Jackson said that his goal was to do 'an album that was like Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. In a thousand years from now, people would still be listening to it.… Something that would live forever.' He's been gone for over half a decade, but I still think about this quote every time I walk past that soundstage—considering the possibilities that Michael Jackson unlocked in every song, the infinite magic that he could create out of an empty room, the orphic visions of one of our final myths."
tl;dr: In 1,000 years, cow-mouthed tourists from the Midwest will flock to New York to buy overpriced tickets to Dangerous.
The Get Down
Ben Travers/IndieWire
"By taking a musical genre [rap] overexposed and misunderstood in the modern day and breaking it down in the past to its component parts, Luhrmann has created a fantastic and fresh blend of his own: a TV show told as a film, a music video told as a six-hour miniseries and an original story holding more truth than most true stories. That being said, if you're not a fan of Luhrmann's trademark direction—propulsive edits, vivid images and a wild, constantly moving camera—good luck with the first 90 minutes."
tl;dr: Don't believe the hype.
Suicide Squad
by Anthony Lane/The New Yorker
"When an actress as distinguished as [Viola] Davis has to pick up a gun and waste a few co-workers, on the ground that they lacked security clearance, you realize that the film's addiction to extremity has infected not merely its phrasing but also its range of available gestures."
tl;dr: Donald Trump just found his secretary of defense.
DJ Khaled—Major Key
by kris ex/Pitchfork
"Khaled's ascent is one of the most remarkable in the past decade of hip-hop history: He started as a bit player in Fat Joe's Terror Squad, but has outlived (and maintained) that association to become a living meme, motivational figure and controller of culture nonpareil."
tl;dr: DJ Khaled is good at everything except DJing.
Jason Bourne
Anthony Lane/The New Yorker
"Much of the latest film smacks of established routine."
tl;dr: Bourne…again.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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