Kara Weisenstein

Uncut Gems got wholly, thoroughly snubbed by the people who dole out little gold men when the Oscars were announced on Monday. But Josh and Benny Safdie, the sibling writer-directors of the crime masterpiece starring Adam Sandler, seem…

Louisiana authorities issued an arrest warrant for pro football player Odell Beckham Jr. on Thursday, after a video surfaced in which it appears he slapped a police officer’s backside. The star wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns was in the…

I regret to inform you: the future of Mindhunter, one of many Netflix series about serial killers, is now in a vegetative state. The show’s second season dropped five months ago, to far less fanfare than its first. Mindhunter debuted in the fall of…

James Bond is Hollywood’s longest-running franchise — and one of its most lucrative. The 24 films centered on British secret agent 007 have raked in a collective $16.3 billion in global ticket sales, adjusted for inflation, according to…

I remember when the very first Build-A-Bear Workshop opened, at a semi-fancy mall in St. Louis (where I grew up) in 1997. Can you imagine anything more magical than a kid-friendly factory where you got to customize and construct your own teddy bear?…

Let’s be real, Billie Eilish could’ve just changed the lyrics to her mega-hit “Bad Guy” to “Bond Guy” and called it a day. Think of Eilish growling, “I’m a Bond guy…” And when the bloopy electro-instrumental comes in, it’s a montage of Bond doing…

The Outsider, a new HBO series based on a Stephen King bestseller, starts like pretty much every other murder mystery in existence. The setting is bleak, beautiful, and Southern, akin to the excellent first season of True Detective. The opening…

Britney Spears delighted the internet three years ago with an Instagram post of herself painting. Scored to Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turka,” the video shows the pop star, blonde hair piled high, concentrating on dabbing paint on a canvas. She’s dressed…

Alrighty folks, the Academy Awards announced its 2020 nominees this morning. If you haven’t perused the full list, here it is. Take a moment, read it fully, and let the snubs really sink in. Maybe spend some time raging about the fact that Joker got…

After filming just two episodes of the Disney+ reboot, Lizzie McGuire creator Terri Minsky stepped down as showrunner of the new series, Variety reported. Production is on hold as Disney searches for her replacement. “Fans have a sentimental…

“There’s 57 channels and nothin’ on,” Bruce Springsteen crooned back in 1992. Nowadays, there’s a heck of a lot to watch, across a ton of platforms — network and cable channels, streaming services, and even YouTube. The number of scripted TV shows…

Fans have worried about Justin Bieber’s wellbeing for a long time. The first half of the 2010s were raucous for the Beebs, in the worst ways. Remember the DUI charges and assault conviction? And that “parody” video that surfaced in 2014, of…

Last night around 7pm, I found myself channel surfing. Not scrolling through Netflix. Channel surfing, through the 20-or-so local stations my parents get at their house in the Midwest, where I’m visiting. It’s a familiar and soothing routine. It…

Cats is a cinematic catastrophe. The internet collectively called it six whole months ago, when that first terrifying trailer hit the web and we all learned what “digital fur technology” looked like. The flick’s fortunes didn’t improve as its…

The podcast gold rush has been booming for some time, and if last year is any indication, things won’t be slowing down anytime soon. A record number of podcasts debuted in 2019, according to podcast search engine Listen Notes. Nearly 250,000 new…

The Golden Globes, uh, happened last night. The ceremony was one of the most awkward in recent memory, from Ricky Gervais’ acrid opening monologue to Renee Zellweger’s strangely catatonic acceptance speech for Judy. You mostly got the sense that…

More than 15 years have passed since Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Phoebe and Monica said goodbye to their gargantuan apartment in the series finale of Friends in 2004. But it seems like the 90s-era sitcom has been part of the zeitgeist more in…

This week, just as 2019 came to an end, a trove of creative work entered the public domain. Anything first published in the United States in 1924 is now free game for anyone to access, reproduce, remix, and otherwise build upon. There are tons of…

Not everyone on the planet had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2019. Adam Sandler, for one, had a fantastic year. For starters, Daniel Day Lewis, perhaps the greatest actor of our era, complimented his dramatic chops about a month ago. The…