Did the Ellisons Pop the Champagne Too Early?

Kim Masters and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw discuss last week’s halt to the Paramount-Warner merger. What the Ellison family once considered a done deal may be a little less certain at the moment.

The quirky alchemy of Widow’s Bay

Eric Deggans talks to Hiro Murai, lead director and executive producer of the Apple TV horror-comedy series Widow’s Bay. They discuss how Murai helped maintain the tricky tone of the Emmy-nominated series, his work with Donald Glover on the FX series Atlanta, and how he keeps the initial spark of creativity alive when dealing with the realities of TV production.

Richard Pryor’s daughter grapples with the complexities of a notorious word

For historian and professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, wrestling with language is part of her job. However, she admits she was left speechless the day a student in one of her classes used the N-word. That moment was the impetus for her new book Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me.

Stordeur Pryor is the daughter of the late comedian, who often used the word in his comedy. The book is an examination of her complicated relationship to the word and to her father. Stordeur Pryor talks to Elvis about what her father was like off stage, how the N-word led to a rift between her father and her white mother, and how she feels now about that day in class.

Weekend Film Reviews: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I Want Your Sex, A Sad and Beautiful World

Gregg Araki is one of the most important directors in the New Queer Cinema, the 1990s film movement that put daring and dark LGBTQ stories onscreen and produced household names like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes. Araki’s movies The Living End and Doom Generation followed cynical queer teenagers as they wrestled with sex and death in an America that didn’t want or understand them. I Want Your Sex is about a new doom generation – Z, not X. Olivia Wilde plays a boundary-pushing artist who starts a kinky affair with her new employee, a recent college graduate played by Cooper Hoffman.

“It’s a really funny movie,” says Alison Willmore, film critic for New York Magazine. “Olivia Wilde leans into the most fun, diva aspects of her character.” Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City, felt I Want Your Sex wanted to be “too many things” at once to work. “At only 90 minutes, it just felt way too long,” Edwards says. “The juvenile tone just hampered everything.”

Willmore and Edwards also review Spider-Man: Brand New Day, A Sad and Beautiful World, and The Samurai and the Prisoner.

Are We All Nostalgic For Better Times?

If you could go anywhere back in time, where would you go? That’s the premise of writer Jessica M. Goldstein’s new novel, Retro.

Set in a fantastical time travel agency, the book follows wealthy tourists who take vacations to the past. Destinations include 1920s speakeasies, bachelor parties at Woodstock, or even just a day wandering through a Y2K shopping mall. Sam chats with Jessica about what inspired the book and what the time travel genre says about our obsession with nostalgia.

Jessica also unpacks a few modern hot topics… Like is smoking cool again? And why are movies so damn dark these days?