The Daily Beast Obsessed

On a recent episode of The Bachelorette, lead Hannah Brown tells suitor and contestant Luke Parker, “I have had sex, and, honestly,Jesus still loves me.” (Jesus was not available for comment.) Each season has a major turning point. Colton Underwood jumping the fence. Arie Luyendyk Jr. dumping his winner for his runner-up. Ben Higgins telling two women he loves them.

Everyone knows the tragic story. On a hazy, mid-July evening 20 years ago, a small airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The passengers on board were something of American royalty—John F. Kennedy Jr., son of former president John F. Kennedy and cultural icon Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette. They were on their way to a summer wedding. No one survived.

There’s a video that went viral earlier this year in which a father films his two-year-old daughter watching Disney’s 1994 animated movie The Lion King for the first time. Specifically, the clip shows her reaction to the scene—that scene—in which Scar throws Mufasa off a cliff into a wildebeest stampede. “No! No! No! No! No!” the girl, named Bella, pleads as Mufasa falls through the air into a gorge.

The minute Rip Torn showed up in a movie or a television show, I always started to grin. OK, I’d think, now we can have some fun. And I was always right. It could be 30 Rock, The Larry Sanders Show, Men in Black, The Man Who Fell to Earth, even the crazy fight scene at the end of Norman Mailer’s Maidstone—didn’t matter how big or small the part, there was something about Torn that made you watch.

It is the biggest moment of breakout director Lulu Wang’s career, and it is all based on a lie. She couldn’t be more upfront about it. The first thing audiences see when The Farewell, Wang’s Sundance darling that opens this weekend, begins is a title card that reads “based on an actual lie.

In the summer of 2014, a Romeo and Juliet love story for the smartphone era went horribly wrong and the nation was faced with an unprecedented question: Can text messages kill? The case of Massachusetts teen Conrad Roy’s suicide and his girlfriend Michelle Carter’s subsequent indictment for involuntary manslaughter immediately captured national attention. HBO’s upcoming documentary special I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v.

The most interesting transgender character on television doesn’t utter the words “I’m trans” until three episodes into her show. The show is Euphoria, HBO’s controversy-courting teen drama, and the character is Jules, a charismatic young transgender girl with Rapinoe-pink hair and a heart that looks for love in all the wrong places.

The horror of finding oneself in a dead-end relationship has rarely been so artfully—or brutally—captured as it is in Ari Aster’s Midsommar, the writer-director’s sophomore feature following last year’s Hereditary.

The Last Czars is proof that two great tastes sometimes do taste great together. A hybrid of The Crown and a bingeable documentary series, Netflix’s six-part historical saga about the fall of Russia’s Romanov dynasty is a lavish period-piece drama driven by non-fiction talking-head interviews and archival material. It’s a combination that, in theory, should negate the power of both its chosen forms, resulting in cardboard cut-out recreations and cursory factual explanations.

Hereditary is not good, so it’s a relief to discover that Ari Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar, is better. Plus, it’s frequently funny! That humor is intentional (at least at first), and the most successful part of the writer/director’s eagerly anticipated sophomore outing, which concerns a couple on the rocks that, in the company of friends, travels to Sweden to attend an ancient pagan festival.