Adam Epstein

Pasadena, California

Tonight, in the state where he began his political career as a community organizer, taught constitutional law, became a state senator, then a US senator, announced his candidacy for president, and declared victory (twice), Barack Obama will address the American people for one last time.

Can you provide world-class leadership? Do you possess team spirit and an excellent work ethic? Are you a Nobel laureate and an illustrious playlist-maker? If so, you may be US president Barack Obama, and thus qualified to fill Spotify’s latest job opening: “president of playlists.”

Hollywood loves a lot of things—car chases, explosions, CGI, love triangles, twists, and incalculable other tropes—but it loves nothing more than itself. The self-infatuation was on full display last night, as La La Land, a movie about movies, took home a record-breaking seven Golden Globe awards.

Eleven television awards were given out at the 74th annual Golden Globes last night, and for the first time in almost three decades, HBO was not among the winners.

Maybe she’d want to be turned into a ghastly computer-generated figure—maybe she’d find the dark humor in it. But Disney, if you’re listening: Find another way to honor Carrie Fisher in the last Star Wars film.

Rest in peace cinema, 1894-2016. Cause of death: Martin Scorsese said so.

The first major domino of the post-Roger Ailes era at Fox News has fallen. The network’s rising star, news anchor Megyn Kelly, is leaving for an influential new gig at rival NBC News.

If the recent spate of deaths of beloved celebrity entertainers has you down in the dumps in this final week of 2016, then here’s something to cheer you up: There are a lot of films and TV shows to look forward to in the new year.

Part of my job is recommending television shows to friends and family. And recommending shows means having to describe them well enough that the person has a reasonable sense of whether or not they’re interesting in watching. Westworld, for instance, is easy: It’s a sci-fi thriller about a Western theme park populated by androids. Veep, a hilarious satire of American politics, is also an easy one to characterize.

The Hollywood trade magazines all reported yesterday that Denis Villeneuve, the director of Arrival and next year’s Blade Runner sequel, is in talks to take on perhaps the most daunting challenge in science fiction: adapting Dune to film.

If you watch movies, you’ve probably heard the “Wilhelm scream,” a stock sound effect of a man screaming that’s become something of a Hollywood inside joke. Since debuting in the 1951 film Distant Drums, the scream has appeared in hundreds of others, including Star Wars, Batman, The Lord of the Rings, and virtually every film in which someone is violently thrown from a ledge or high surface.

This story reveals a plot element in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that some readers might consider a spoiler.

Blade Runner fans, fear not: You have every right to be protective of the legendary 1982 sci-fi film’s legacy, but know that its sequel is in very good hands. And the first trailer for the follow-up, released yesterday, proves it will feature an aesthetic much like the Ridley Scott original.

This year may have been a pretty awful for some things, but it was a wonderful and diverse year for television. FX Research estimated that 451 original scripted TV shows aired in the United States in 2016—entirely too many for a normal human bound by linear time to handle.

Christopher Nolan has journeyed into a black hole, infiltrated dreams, and surveyed the streets of Gotham City (thrice). His work is often forward-looking, speculative, metaphysical. But his next film will render a very real and very historic event: the evacuation of Dunkirk, a major turning point in World War II when more than 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers, trapped on the shores of northern France and surrounded by German troops, miraculously escaped across the English Channel.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a film that you will probably see, comes out on Friday in the United States. Yesterday, Disney’s Lucasfilm lifted the review embargo on the highly anticipated Star Wars prequel, unleashing a flood of takes—mostly positive, with a few glaring dissents.

Barack Obama used a sit-down with The Daily Show host Trevor Noah to express his frustration and disappointment at the US electorate’s apathy in the face of grave allegations that Russia was actively trying to sway the results of the US election.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the nominees for the 2017 Golden Globes this morning, shining a spotlight on some of the best television and films of the year.

The superhero genre has become tedious, saturated by a deluge of repetitive films. These films still make a lot of money, but that may not last forever. Audiences are beginning to reject sequels and reboots, and superhero movies could be next if studios can’t figure out how to reinvigorate the lucrative business.

Now that Westworld is off the air until 2018, HBO has some holes to fill in its schedule. Game of Thrones, the network’s crown jewel, won’t return until the summer, postponed a few months from its usual starting slot in April, so the production could shoot in the right weather to accommodate the arrival of winter in Westeros. That leaves HBO without a tent-pole drama to prop up the rest of its programming slate in the first half of 2017.

Tom Hanks has range. Two months ago, he played bizarro amusement ride attraction ”David S. Pumpkins” in everyone’s favorite Saturday Night Live sketch. Then he played heroic American airline captain Chesley Sullenberger in the film Sully. And now he’s set to play a domineering Silicon Valley CEO-type obsessed with radical transparency, in The Circle, based on the 2013 best-selling novel about a powerful tech company by Dave Eggers.

It took Dr. Robert Ford 30 years to plan and execute his final Westworld narrative, so we should be grateful that it’ll only take Westworld—the HBO show—two years to film its next season.

The greatest mystery of HBO’s Westworld isn’t a riddle to be solved, but rather a question to be pondered.