Episodes
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Elections can be pretty stressful. And it never hurts to have some emergency distractions on hand if you just need to shut down for a while. One of our favorites is YouTube: a place for the good, the bad, the bizarrely detailed, and the wildly specialized. Today, we're talking about our favorite YouTube rabbit holes that are great distractions.
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In the HBO new series The Penguin, an unrecognizable Colin Farrell reprises his role as Oswald Cobb from The Batman. This time though, the caped crusader is nowhere to be found. Instead, we've got an unexpectedly fresh take on Gotham, and a crackling turf war involving the vengeful daughter of a crime boss, played by Cristin Milioti.
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Episodes manquant?
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What if you spent eternity in one living room? That's the premise of Here, a new drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as a married couple whose lives unfold in that living room over the course of many decades. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film also shows vignettes of other people who lived in the house, and moments throughout history.
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In the Netflix drama The Diplomat, Keri Russell plays an ambassador who's thrust into an international incident with massive stakes. She's also sorting through a tumultuous marriage with her husband, a hotshot veteran diplomat (Rufus Sewell). The series combines the tension of Homeland with the administrative drama of The West Wing. The Diplomat just returned for a new season, so in this encore episode, we revisit our conversation about the series.
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The new movie Conclave is a fun and twisty political thriller. Ralph Fiennes plays a cardinal tasked to managing the secretive process in which the pope is replaced. The film offers plenty of scandals, surprises, and dark horses, along with some strong commentary on the state of the Catholic church. Directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), the film also stars Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini.
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Agatha All Along is a darkly funny new Marvel show on Disney Plus. It stars the selfish, sardonic and hilariously petty witch Agatha Harkness, played by the great and good Kathryn Hahn. When a mysterious goth teen saves her from a spell she's been trapped in, she assembles a coven of witches so they can together undergo a series of trials that will grant them each what they most desire. The thing is – the other witches hate Agatha's guts, and there's more to this goth kid than meets the eye.
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In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns for a third time as a sad-sack loser with an alien symbiotic life-form bonded to him. This time out, it's a buddy comedy and road movie, as the two are hunted by another race of aliens. And along the way, they meet some hippies, hit the Vegas strip, and get in a quick dance number.
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Netflix's Woman Of The Hour is not your conventional serial killer movie. It's based on the true story of a serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game in the 1970s. But it's also about the women who became — or almost became — his victims. Directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, it's a tense, thoughtful film that has much to say about the systems that make life easier for dangerous and otherwise crummy men.
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We've all been there. A major movie is mentioned, you shrug, sheepishly, and someone says, "I can't believe you've never seen that!" Today, we make a dent in our own lists of classic films we somehow had not yet gotten to, including Erin Brockovich, Flower Drum Song, Enter the Dragon and Raging Bull.
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The new movie Anora is a dark rom-dramedy about an enterprising sex worker (Mikey Madison) who links up with a very rich and very immature young man (Mark Eydelshteyn). Their transactional encounter turns into a quickie Vegas wedding. But her new in-laws are Russian oligarchs, and they'll do everything in their power to put an end to this whirlwind romance. Anora is the latest feature from writer and director Sean Baker (The Florida Project). Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture.
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The horror movie Smile was a massive hit. Its flashy new sequel Smile 2 finds the franchise's terrifying entity infecting a new host: a pop star (Naomi Scott) who's about to head out on tour after experiencing a trauma. And the movie has a lot to say about the horrors of pop stardom.
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Two people meet, they fall in love, and someone gets sick. The new film We Live In Time tries to bring something new to that familiar story of the preciousness of life. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield laugh and cry as a couple trying to make the most of their time together. Director John Crowley (Brooklyn) utilizes an unconventional structure that jumps around from their first meeting to their later crisis and several key points in between.
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A lot of us are about to have the experience of opening our front doors to find witches, goblins, ghosts, and Moo Deng standing on our porches. Why? Because it's almost Halloween. In this encore episode, we talk about what kinds of entertainment scared us when we were kids, and whether they still scare us now.
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In the powerful new Apple TV+ drama Disclaimer, Cate Blanchett plays a woman who's terrified after she's sent a novel that's based on a chapter of her past that she's desperate to keep secret. From Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón, the series was also stars Kevin Kline, as a man who's also consumed by the events recounted in the book.
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The new film Saturday Night attempts to capture the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the very first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Untried producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) and his cast of complete unknowns prepare to make television history. At the same time, network suits breathe down their necks, and just about everything that can go wrong does.
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The word "basic" often gets thrown around to describe anything that's mainstream, popular, frictionless, or otherwise inoffensive. But sometimes basic stuff is just what we crave, whether it's a binge-watch, a popular song, or a pumpkin spice latte. It's fall, so today we're talking about what we're calling... Pop Culture Pumpkin Spice Lattes.
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We're in a pretty critical election year. And in times like these, a lot of us are turning to political comedy to help make sense of (and fun of) the bizarre, ongoing news cycle. Today on the show, we're talking about how late night comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and The Daily Show are speaking to the moment.
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The off-beat psycho dramedy A Different Man follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor living with facial disfigurement. He takes an opportunity to try a new procedure and reconstruct his appearance. But then, he encounters a guy with the same condition he once had, and who lives a fun, fulfilling life. To put it mildly, Edward now has some regrets.
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The new film Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to 2019's Joker, which won Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar. This new film is a courtroom drama and a romance tossed into a musical blender set to liquefy, as the Joker goes on trial for the murders he committed in the last film and falls in love with a groupie played by Lady Gaga.
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The Wild Robot is a gorgeous and moving new animated movie from Dreamworks. It follows a helper robot named Roz (Lupita Nyong'o) who washes up on the beach of a remote island and learns to blend in with the wildlife. After an accident, Roz unexpectedly finds herself the caregiver of a baby gosling named Brightbill (Kit O'Connor) Soon, it's learning lessons about parenthood and sacrifice while teaching the animals to work together.
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