When the painter Marianne first encounters a young noblewoman named Héloïse, whom she has been hired to paint without her knowledge, she is met with the back of a billowing black cloak, tense and furious as a storm cloud. Héloïse says nothing before she jolts away—out the door, across wet grass, then straight toward a towering, jagged cliff. Marianne is at first curious.

It was bound to happen. The tightest curls sometimes fall out, the most meticulous makeup smudges, the perfectly pressed skirt wrinkles, or, in the case of Midge Maisel, the punchline doesn’t land. With The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a comedy series with two astonishingly strong, award-winning seasons under its belt, the quality was going to at some point falter. The marvelous was going to get a little bit meh. But the thing about a show that holds itself to as high a standard as The Marvelous Mrs.

It’s hard to know where to begin when talking to Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson about their new film, A Million Little Pieces. Do you start with the fact that the film, which they both wrote and produced, Sam directed, and Aaron stars in, is an adaptation of James Frey’s controversial memoir? As in the controversial memoir: the 2003 best-seller about Frey’s time as a 23-year-old addict in rehab for which, it was later found, he fabricated significant, crucial portions.

After Alex Borstein finished her acceptance speech for winning Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at this year’s Emmy Awards—her second in a row for playing talent manager Susie Myerson on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—she ran backstage and threw up.

Mena Massoud had just, in theory, become a billion-dollar man. On the hot summer morning when we first meet in Beverly Hills, the young actor has a buoyant pep in his step. You could say he’s gliding. Flying even.

Gabrielle Union’s firing from NBC’s hit variety show America’s Got Talent has raised a flurry of questions and concerns about the show, and the culture at NBC. Union co-hosted the popular show for one season, but her contract was not renewed and the public is left wondering exactly why the actress won’t be coming back to AGT.

The key to unlocking any cinematic mystery worth chewing on—like, say, how Rian Johnson crafted an old-school, Agatha Christie-indebted whodunit as crisp and crowd-pleasing yet politically urgent as Knives Out—is to first assess what we do and don’t know. First, there is how the writer-director (of Brick, Looper, and most recently before this, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) assembled his rogue’s gallery of suspects.

Last week, doe-eyed alt-rocker Beck denied he was a Scientologist, telling the Sydney Morning Herald his previously avowed beliefs were all just a “misconception.” The declaration came on the heels of his 14th studio album, and arrives months after he initiated divorce proceedings against his ex-wife, who also practiced Scientology.

Before Mike Birbiglia became a father, Judd Apatow cast him as one. “He cast me as a dad before my life did,” Birbiglia, who played Amy Schumer’s schlubby, suburban brother-in-law in the movie Trainwreck, explains on this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. After spending the whole day fielding improvised insults from Schumer on set, Birbiglia jokes that he would come home and tell his wife Jen, who writes poetry under the name J.

M. Night Shyamalan likes the fact that’s it cold, dark, and rainy outside. “It’s atmospheric,” he says with a mischievous grin, laughing at his own cheekiness when he notices me frown out the window of the Manhattan hotel room where we meet. Atmosphere is, of course, Shyamalan’s thing. Or it’s one of his things at least. Big creative swings, polarized fan reactions, and, of course, surprise twists are very much his thing, too.