Soleil Moon Frye’s documentary Kid 90, which premiered on Hulu this month, is an exercise in resurrected childhood. Frye was a child star in the early ’90s, the eponymous character in the show Punky Brewster, and she knew most of the other child and teen actors in the business. She often carried a camcorder to parties, and she now possesses footage of dozens of nostalgia-gilded faces caught at the height of their fame and completely off-guard. (David Arquette! Brian Austin Greene! Leonardo DiCaprio for about three seconds!)

What Kid 90 wants to say, outside of “look at all these famous…

How I Got Radicalized

Welcome to “How I Got Radicalized,” a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.

In the fall of 1998, as my big sister’s 15th birthday approached, we both huddled in excitement on the moss-green carpet of our home, watching cable TV as we awaited our mother’s return from a neighboring town. We lived in Bauchi, a city in northern Nigeria, and Mum had gone on a several-day trip to Jos, about two hours away. It was an unspoken family tradition for our parents to return from out-of-town trips…

I’ve had the feeling of following the film Minari around for a few months now since the first time I saw the trailer last year. I guessed Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari would be different to me from just about any other film I’d seen from how, even those two minutes, evoked my own memories in a way I wasn’t used to. I laughed with recognition while reading Jay Caspian Kang’s New York Times Magazine profile of Steven Yeun, one of the film’s stars, when he describes this feeling:

When the trailer for Minari appeared online this past fall, I texted…

Last week, HBO Max released a film called Locked Down, a thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film is mostly unremarkable, with two likable actors being likable but not particularly inspired, and the thriller aspect is especially limp; it’s a heist movie that really doesn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a complicated heist. It is the very definition of a movie you forget about an hour after you’ve seen it.

But there’s one unique thing about it: It was made during the pandemic. Directed by Doug Liman, it was written, shot, and edited entirely…

How I Got Radicalized

Welcome to “How I Got Radicalized,” a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.

There is something both horrifying and awe-inducing about the chorus girl. As a young girl, I was enraptured by this sort of pageantry, from the serene statues of the Ziegfeld Follies to the army of women in Busby Berkeley musicals. I loved the way the chorus girls, like rows of soldiers, swiveled and kicked in unison. I admired their commitment to bold lips, lashes, and pearls. …

When the trailers for Promising Young Woman arrived last spring, they were greeted with celebration. The movie looked amazing. The script, by Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, had already earned a ton of industry buzz. And the premise — a sadistic young woman (played by Carey Mulligan) hunts down and torments the people involved in an old college rape case — was impossibly well-aligned with the ethos of the #MeToo era. This was the story of an enraged woman taking down men who had been living consequence-free for too long.

Now, after a series of Covid-19-related delays, Promising Young Woman…

How I Got Radicalized

Welcome to How I Got Radicalized, a new series that tells a story about a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.

I still don’t entirely understand the brief teenage phase I had in the mid-1990s, seeking out things I considered outright bad as entertainment. It lasted six to nine months, around the time I was gearing up to take my driver’s test. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was hiding from. This period of time, circa 1996, was a great run for pop culture with a noticeable edge: How weird can you go? People were…

As quarantine life stretches into its eighth month in the U.S., simultaneously sending us all looking for diverting entertainment and shutting down any new film releases, many of us are returning to the movies of our childhood and adolescence. Which ones were overrated? Which are better than we remembered? And which have just aged terribly? Lindy West — a writer best known for her book-turned-television show, Shrill — is here to answer those questions with her new book Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema.

The book is a critical romp through 23 contemporary classics like Top…