Wesley went to the final stop of the Cowboy Carter Tour. He talks through what he saw — the genre of it all, and the quietly powerful politics — with Salamishah Tillet, Times contributing critic and the professor behind an entire class about Beyoncé.

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What does Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie “Sinners” have in common with the Drake-Kendrick beef? Wesley has a theory that he’s been sitting with for weeks. He shares it with the writer Rembert Browne, and together they consider the vampiric threats facing Black art in America right now.

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Twenty-four years ago, Wesley Morris and the film curator Eric Hynes were just a couple of “cooler-than-you” cinephiles working at Kim’s Video, the beloved New York City video store. They recently got together to dissect the trends, snubs and outliers on the Times’s 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list and to shed a few tears over their own top 10s, which we've shared below. 

FROM WESLEY MORRIS: 

1. Norte, The End of History
2. Mad Max: Fury Road
3. The Piano Teacher
4. O.J.: Made in America
5. Wall-E
6. Moonlight
7. The Holy Girl
8. Inherent Vice
9. Love and Diane
10. Magic Mike XXL

FROM ERIC HYNES:

1. In the Mood for Love
2. The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence (tie)
3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence 
4. The New World
5. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
6. Synecdoche, New York
7. Cameraperson 
8. 35 Shots of Rum 
9. Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man (tie)
10. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

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Wesley Morris talks with Samin Nosrat, a chef and food writer, about her love-hate relationship with “The Bear,” a show that’s always racing against the clock. She says the best moments, in the show and in our own kitchens, happen when things slow down.

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In the new HBO documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” Paul Reubens, the creator of the iconic character Pee-wee Herman, comes out as gay. Reubens, who spent most of his career in the closet, had already come out years before but then returned to the closet during his time as the popular Saturday morning children’s show host.

On today’s episode of “Cannonball,” Wesley Morris talks with the writer Mark Harris about Reubens’s relationship to being closeted, and they discuss what it means for artists to publicly come out.

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The trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs ended on Wednesday when he was convicted of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution but was acquitted of the most serious charges against him: racketeering and sex trafficking. Wesley Morris, our critic at large, attended some of the court proceedings over the past couple months, and he walked away with deep and complicated feelings about witnessing the drama of, as he put it, “yet another very famous Black man on trial.” On today’s episode, Wesley wrestles with those feelings in conversation with our producer John White.

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Host Wesley Morris has a confession to make: He loves Bruno Mars. Nothing wrong with that, right? With the help of the culture writer Niela Orr, Wesley untangles his crush from his discomfort with the pop star’s cozy relationship to Blackness.

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A new weekly podcast, hosted by the critic Wesley Morris. Come on in, the culture’s fine.

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Today: The undoing of Kanye West. “We’re in deeply vile territory, and I can’t make intellectual sense of that,” Wesley Morris says about West, who now goes by Ye.

In 2004, when Ye released “College Dropout," he seemed to be challenging Black orthodoxy in ways that felt exciting and risky. But over the years, his expression of “freedom” has felt anything but free. His embrace of anti-Black, antisemitic and white supremacist language “comes at the expense of other people’s safety,” their humanity and their dignity, J Wortham says.

Wesley and J discuss what it means to divest from someone whose art, for two decades, had awed, challenged and excited you.

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“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” came into theaters with a huge responsibility: It had to address the death of Chadwick Boseman, the star of the first “Black Panther” movie, who died of cancer in August 2020.

Wesley and J discuss how the film offers the audience an experience of collective grief and mourning — something that never happened in the United States in response to the losses of 2020. They interrogate what it means that this gesture of healing came from Marvel and Disney, a corporate empire that is in control of huge swaths of our entertainment, and not from another type of leadership.

Additional resources:

• To hear what Wesley and J had to say about the first “Black Panther” movie, listen to this episode of “Still Processing” from 2018.
   
• Ryan Coogler, the director of “Wakanda Forever,” spoke to the author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the making of movie, and how it captured the real-life grief that people experienced after Chadwick Boseman’s death. Listen to their conversation here.

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