Richard Lawson

2 weeks ago | vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson

After a decade of Creed films and Black Panther movies, it’s a thrill to see writer-director Ryan Coogler—one of the great populist Hollywood talents working today—do something new. Though his latest film, Sinners (in theaters April 18), traffics in familiar horror-action tropes, its milieu and thematic arguments feel novel to the genre. Big, ambitious, and erratic, Sinners is a wide-appeal studio movie from a filmmaker breathtakingly adept at the form.

2 weeks ago | vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson

The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us, which premiered in 2023 to great acclaim, looks best in contrast to something else. It’s a somber, scary zombie apocalypse drama, but it is not The Walking Dead. The latter show’s aggressive nihilism is nowhere to be found in the first season of The Last of Us, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s adaptation of the popular video game. Darkness looms over everything, but hope and humanity seep in through the cracks.

2 weeks ago | vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson

Perhaps those complaining that this season of HBO’s The White Lotus was a little slow were at least partially satisfied by Sunday night’s action-packed finale, which ended with a gun battle and the second-highest body count we’ve yet seen on the series. Unlike last year’s ludicrous bang-bang ending, with Jennifer Coolidge shooting her way out of a gay murder boat (only to trip, fall, bang her head, and die anyway), this melee was a graver, more earnestly tragic affair.

3 weeks ago | vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson

The actor Nina Hoss first came into my consciousness in Christian Petzold’s rapturous, sad, mysterious 2014 film Phoenix, in which Hoss gets to be at the center of one of the greatest closing scenes in recent memory. Hoss holds a small audience rapt with a song, in the process gradually revealing her true identity in devastating fashion. She’d been a rising star in her native Germany for some time, both onscreen and onstage, but Phoenix put her on the international map.

3 weeks ago | vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson

The hook of the new mini-series Dying for Sex (FX on Hulu, April 3) is right there in the title. There will be dying—but first there will be sex, the kind you won’t see on regular television. There is also the draw of star Michelle Williams, a former teen idol turned highly respected dramatic actor being given the chance to do something ribald, daring, transgressive. In its first few episodes, Dying for Sex leans into the promise of giddy, provocative risk.