Miles Surrey

It feels like Hollywood has never done right by Dev Patel. Ever since he broke out with the one-two punch of Skins and Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire, true star-making roles have largely eluded him. (There are so many things wrong with M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender; Patel’s performance as Prince Zuko isn’t one of them.) As Patel explained to The Guardian in 2021, instead of receiving offers to play a leading man, he would often have to “wait f…

“I’m sorry, but we can’t admit a visitor from within the Hudson.” The Intrepid Museum is one of the most fascinating tourist attractions in Manhattan: a World War II–era aircraft carrier that houses an expansive collection of fighter jets, bombers, helicopters, and more. To visit the Intrepid is to walk through decades of aeronautical history: a stirring reminder of what mankind has achieved since the Wright brothers first took flight at the turn of the 20th century. I could tour the Intrepid a…

When Sydney Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time earlier this month, it was a fairly lackluster affair. With the exception of an amusing sketch in which cast member Bowen Yang was “revealed” to be straight and in turn seduced Sweeney, the episode will go down as barely a footnote in the annals of SNL. Conversely, there was plenty of attention paid to Sweeney’s appearance on the show. Conservative commentators latched on to a harebrained narrative that Sweeney’s cleavage was mean…

The 2024 Academy Awards are in the books, which means we’ve finally reached the end of awards season. (That sound you hear is countless pop culture bloggers breathing a collective sigh of relief.) While there weren’t too many surprises during the show, the Oscars did what they do best: celebrate some of the best movies of the year, while giving a generational filmmaker his worthy coronation on Hollywood’s biggest night. Below, we break down the biggest winners and losers from Sunday’s festivitie…

There have been several shows aspiring to be the “next Game of Thrones,” including HBO’s own prequel series about the fall of House Targaryen. What unites many of these would-be successors is that they’re works of fantasy: If Thrones proved that audiences had an appetite for a series featuring dragons and ice zombies, the thinking goes, viewers will hunger for something similar. But while the fantasy elements were an essential ingredient for Thrones, the secret sauce was something a bit more gro…

No streaming service can pull off a perfect batting average with its original programming, but when it comes to Netflix’s live-action anime adaptations, the company has long been hitting below the Mendoza Line. Storied animes like Cowboy Bebop and Death Note arrived on the streamer with plenty of fanfare, only to be eviscerated by the very communities to which Netflix was trying to cater. Every live-action anime adaptation faces a unique challenge: the fantastical, seemingly limitless possibilit…

When Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom arrived over the holidays with minimal marketing and even less fanfare, it felt like a sea change (sorry) for superhero movies. Just as The Lost Kingdom underwhelmingly closed the chapter on the DC Extended Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in the midst of its worst stretch to date, compounded by The Marvels’ bombing at the box office. Now, in 2024, Marvel and DC are in a bit of a retreat: All DC has on the calendar is Joker: Folie à Deux—a [sigh] musi…

The turning point was a Hillary Clinton tweet. When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, the Barbie duo of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed out on Best Director and Best Actress, respectively. Never mind that Gerwig and Robbie were still recognized for their respective roles as a writer and a producer on the film—or that Barbie ended up with eight nominations, including Best Picture. Some corners of the internet felt that the Academy committed a grave injustice. That’s when publ…

I’m a longtime fan of entertainment that caters to the dads of the world, so it brings me no pleasure to report that fathers everywhere let themselves down over the holidays. On Christmas Day, Michael Mann’s Ferrari raced into theaters. This should’ve been catnip for Dad Cinema lovers: a biopic about legendary automaker Enzo Ferrari, featuring impressive replicas of ’50s-era sports cars ferociously zipping through picturesque Italian roads, as directed by the living legend responsible for Heat.…

The long and winding road that is award season has finally arrived at one of its most pivotal pit stops: the 2024 Academy Award nominations. It’s been a great morning for the cultural juggernaut that is Oppenheimer; unfortunately, the same can’t be said for critical darlings like May December or The Iron Claw. For all that and more, check out The Ringer’s winners and losers from Tuesday’s nominations. Are we really surprised? After dominating the Golden Globes, Oppenheimer came away with 13 nom…

Better late than never: After being delayed four months on account of the Hollywood labor strikes, the 75th Emmy Awards finally arrived. It was all a bit strange, and to make matters even more confusing for a ceremony airing in 2024, this Emmys eligibility window stretched back to June 2022. (This explains how Obi-Wan Kenobi—a show nobody has thought about in literal years—was up for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.) But for all the chaos leading up to the Emmys, the ceremony itself was…

Sunday night was intended to mark a new era for the Golden Globes. The Globes have long been positioned as the chaotic, boozier cousin of the Oscars—the former hasn’t always been a useful precursor for the rest of awards season, but it tends to make up for it by packing a bunch of A-listers together with an open bar. (Drunk Globes acceptance speeches are their own kind of category.) Starting this year, however, the Globes are under new management. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association—a small,…

From the early days of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek to contemporary hits like The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, television has long been home to compelling science fiction. But the quality of the genre’s offerings hasn’t always been matched with an uptick in quantity. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Sci-Fi Channel (since rebranded as Syfy) debuted, and its programming tends to skew more Sharknado than The Expanse. In fact, The Expanse was shaping up to be one of Syfy’s greatest origi…

Christmas is nearly upon us, and the dads of the world will be treated to the greatest holiday gift of all: a new Michael Mann movie. The legendary filmmaker behind Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, and Collateral has long been established as Dad Cinema royalty, and his latest project fits right into that wheelhouse. Folks, fasten your seat belts for Ferrari. Set during the summer of 1957, Ferrari recounts a turbulent period in the life of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), who enters Ferrari into Italy’…

It’s been 20 years since John Woo made a Hollywood movie, but in many ways, it’s like he never left. He’s widely considered one of the greatest action directors of all time, and his influence can be felt across the genre; the John Wick franchise, in particular, owes a great debt to the balletic “gun-fu” style the auteur pioneered in films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled. As Quentin Tarantino once said of Woo: “Yeah, he can direct an action scene—and Michelangelo could paint a…

A lot has happened in the past 12 months of television: acclaimed series came to a close; nostalgic hits like Frasier and Party Down were revived; labor strikes shut down Hollywood, leading to many shows being delayed or outright canceled; the 2023 Emmys got pushed back to January 2024; The Idol, uh, happened. But amid all the industry upheaval, there was also plenty of great television. Audiences were treated to a bit of everything this year: pitch-black satires, heartwarming dramedies, thought…

There was a time when Noah Hawley was viewed as television’s next great auteur—whenever publications are likening your work to Stanley Kubrick’s, you’re doing something right. The Kubrick comparisons are a bit much, but in the peak era of Peak TV, there were few creators riding a higher wave than Hawley. By 2017, he had debuted three seasons of Fargo: an anthology series inspired by the Coen brothers classic of the same name that managed to honor the film’s legacy without being beholden to it. (…

The internet can be a useful, if flawed, barometer for gauging when public opinion sours on a celebrity, even for the most benign offenses. It wasn’t long ago that Lin-Manuel Miranda was basking in near-universal acclaim for Hamilton—now, Gen Z has turned on him for being an avatar of millennial cringe. (As a fellow millennial, that stings, but also, I get it.) More recently, the digital pitchforks have been sharpened for another seemingly innocuous figure: Taika Waititi. For years, Waititi cut…

In news that should surprise no one, one of the most high-profile theatrical releases of November is The Marvels, the 33rd (!) installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which will bring together characters from Captain Marvel and the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. The early box office tracking has The Marvels opening in the $75-80 million range, and while that would be an impressive haul for nearly any film, it’s yet another concerning development for the MCU. For one, Captain Marvel grossed mor…

Throughout the course of Billions, characters have conspired to take down their enemies with comically elaborate schemes. It’s only natural, then, that the series finale, “Admirals Fund,” hinges on one last con. With self-made billionaire Mike Prince (Corey Stoll) shaping up to be the next POTUS, longtime adversaries Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) work together to take away the one thing that legitimizes Prince’s candidacy: his wealth. As Prince goes to meet with…