Laugh at Trump’s convention lineup all you want. Reality TV is coming for you

Here are the latest reports from The Washington Posts ‘Act Four’.

Laugh at Trump’s convention lineup all you want. Reality TV is coming for you.

It’s true that the speakers’ lineup at the Republican National Convention proves, as it has proved in years past, that there are not a lot of A-list Hollywood celebrities who are terribly eager to show up and endorse Republican candidates on a national stage. Given Clint Eastwood’s bout of performance art in 2012, that may […]

If ‘Ghostbusters’ is a feminist victory, feminist pop culture is doomed

This piece discusses the plot of the 2016 remake of “Ghostbusters.” I don’t know when it became a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that equality for women, people of color and anyone else who has been shut out of big roles and big paychecks means trying to do the exact same thing as white men. […]

In ‘Motel of the Mysteries’ America falls — and it doesn’t actually matter

This piece is the last in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  Considering how America might meet its demise is usually an exercise that leads us to take ourselves extremely seriously. We’re the world’s greatest superpower, so what will happen […]

In the ‘Fallout’ franchise, the essence of America survives the apocalypse

This piece is the latest in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  Playing one of the games in the “Fallout” franchise is a little like taking a very twisted tour of a major American city. The two most recent entries […]

The police dictatorship of ‘Judge Dredd’ feels frighteningly real

This piece is the latest in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  The world may end in fire or ice, but when we think about the death of America, the biggest risks tend to be ones that we pose to […]

The ‘Left Behind’ series was just the latest way America prepared for the Rapture

Please welcome Alissa Wilkinson, the critic at large at Christianity Today, to Act Four! This piece is the latest in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  As a way to kick off the end of the world with a bang, […]

‘The Hunger Games’ warned us that reality TV would take over our politics

This piece is the latest in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  In “The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins’s trilogy about a ruined America mesmerized by a vicious reality series, the precise nature of America’s downfall remains purposefully vague. The official […]

How zombies became a uniquely American horror

Please welcome Daniel Drezner, who blogs for The Washington Post over at Spoiler Alerts, to Act Four. He is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as well as an expert on zombies. This piece is the latest in […]

‘Southland Tales’ plunged us straight into a post-apocalyptic mental breakdown

This piece is the latest in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  I’ve watched a lot of bad, spectacularly messy movies in my life as a critic, but I can’t think of something quite as disastrous that’s got as deep […]

How ‘Dr. Strangelove’ taught us to stop worrying and love the end of the world

This piece is the first in a week-long series about the end of America in fiction. For the full archives of the series, check back here throughout the week.  When thinking about the apocalypse, my mind always drifts to the absurd. And there’s no more absurd consideration of the end of America than Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 […]

All the ways America could come to an end

It’s no exaggeration, and perhaps even something of an understatement, to say that America is in a bad place right now. We have a national crisis of confidence in the criminal-justice system, a presidential election that has pulled once-marginalized ideas back into the mainstream of public discussion and a growing sense that the wealthy live in […]

‘The Night Of’ critiques the justice system, but falls short of greatness

This post discusses some details from “The Night Of,” though no major plot details beyond the pilot. The worst gap between rigorous style and ridiculous substance fortunately comes early in “The Night Of,” which is why I can argue honestly that you should push through it to what comes after. In HBO’s new miniseries, which […]

Norman Lear on burlesque comedy, Elizabeth Warren and diversity in Hollywood

What Shonda Rhimes is to television today, Norman Lear was to the 1970s: an auteur who dominates the broadcast television schedule with series such as “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” that dive right into some of America’s most fraught political debates. Today, “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You,” a […]

In voice work, actors of color can escape typecasting

“Modern Love: The Podcast,” WBUR and the New York Times’s relatively new audio series, enlists acclaimed actors to read essays that have been previously featured in the New York Times column of the same name. It’s a sonic experiment with often surprising results. Jason Alexander’s reading of an essay about grief and a dead goldfish […]

The best pop culture writing gets at how we really see ourselves

Good cultural writing doesn’t necessarily end with a ranking of what is best or a determination that something is worth seeing. Rather, the best writing about popular culture — about music, about movies, about TV shows, about books, about whatever — interrogates the way we think rather than what we think. And two recent books […]

‘Hamilton’ is a smash. Why so few other stories about the American Revolution?

“Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sprightly, race-flipped musical about the man who established the American financial system, has audiences scrambling for tickets, mashing up its lyrics with other pop culture and debating race and Broadway. The runaway success of “Hamilton” is striking for all of these reasons, but it’s left me wondering about something else, too: “Hamilton” highlights the […]

It will take more than new members for the Academy to get beyond #OscarsSoWhite

After an Oscar season in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got strafed for nominating only white actors and actresses for the second consecutive year, the Academy took a big step last week to try to become something other than #SoWhite, inviting 683 people, many of them women or non-white, to join the […]

Laura Mvula’s ‘The Dreaming Room’ mines riches from mental illness and personal pain

Onstage and in videos, Laura Mvula is ethereal, her face painted in swaths of ebony or electric blue. When she sings, her posh British accent comes through, and she wears feathers, tall platform heels, and high, structured collars as easily as she does a soft summer cardigan. With her 2013 debut album, “Sing to the […]

‘The Witness’ captures the lingering damage from Kitty Genovese’s murder

Kitty Genovese’s name became iconic and notorious after she was murdered in New York in 1964, the supposed callousness of the neighbors who ignored her cries for help becoming a symbol of the fracturing of the American social compact that has persisted for decades. The problem, of course, as we know now, is that the story […]

Partisanship and tribalism are ruining our conversations about art

If art is a mirror of society — and I have to believe in some funhouse sort of way that it is — then reactions to art offer their own sorts of reflections. And the visage we see staring back at us would make Dorian Gray flinch. It’s no secret that American society has grown […]

How ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ foreshadowed an age of antiheroines

One of the great privileges of coming back to a work you saw when you were young, or at least younger, is the way a story can change over time. Benny, the upwardly mobile landlord, might have seemed like the villain when “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s musical about bohemians and HIV, premiered in 1996, but with […]

This year, ‘Game of Thrones’ finally fulfilled its dark feminist promise

As long as I’ve been a full-time professional critic, I’ve been writing about “Game of Thrones,” and specifically about the idea that George R.R. Martin’s sprawling series and the HBO drama adapted from it are, at their core, about the poisonous influence of misogyny on men, women and whole nations. “Game of Thrones” hasn’t always lived […]

The Post’s Jason Rezaian to be honored by PEN Center USA

Six months after he was released from prison in Iran, PEN Center USA has announced that The Post’s Jason Rezaian will receive the Freedom to Write Award at the center’s Literary Awards Festival gala in September. Willow Bay, director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will receive the Award […]

‘The Daily Show’ proves why TV shows deserve dignified deaths

On Monday, after the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a Texas law that would have restricted the number of abortion clinics that were able to operate in the state, the official account for “The Daily Show” sent out a widely derided tweet. “Celebrate the #SCOTUS ruling!” the missive declared jovially. “Go knock someone up in […]

‘Independence Day: Resurgence’ is terrible, and yet still ahead of its time

It’s an actual challenge to describe just how terrible “Independence Day: Resurgence” is, even in a year when the disaster that was “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” should have had me limbered up and ready to sling some juicy, pejorative adjectives. This is a movie where the putative hero imitates a tasteless decal in […]

‘Game of Thrones,’ Season 6, Episode 10 Review: “The Winds of Winter”

Note: I’m reviewing “Game of Thrones” from the perspective of someone who has read all of George R.R. Martin’s novels, while my colleague David Malitz, who hasn’t read the books, will be writing straight recaps. His write-up of episode 10, “The Winds of Winter” will appear at The Post’s Style Blog. This post discusses the events […]

‘Finding Dory’ isn’t just about disability — it’s about community and support