SwiftBlog

Every week, Vulture runs through the best, most interesting, and sometimes most confusing rap releases. In this installment: Billy Woods teams up with Kenny Segal for an impressively paranoid and deadpan release, Juvenile returns to a very different rap landscape, Chicago’s Tree continues to be engrossing, and Don Trip, a man ahead of his time, writes amazing music once you get through the first few tracks of his new album. billy woods & Kenny Segal, Hiding Places [Read More]

The true-crime-podcast universe is ever-expanding. We’re here to make it a bit smaller and a bit more manageable. There are a lot of great shows, and each has a lot of great episodes, so we want to highlight the noteworthy and the exceptional. Each week, our crack team of podcast enthusiasts and specialists will pick their favorites. Ologies: “Graphology (Handwriting/Forgery) with Sylvia Kessler” Host Alie Ward’s weekly science deep dive takes a turn for the criminal this week as she welcomes graphologist-graphoanalyst Sylvia Kessler as her guest. [Read More]

How Baz Luhrmann reengineered 2008’s Australia to bring new perspectives to Faraway Downs. Faraway Downs isn’t “Australia-plus” or a director’s cut, Luhrmann emphasizes; instead, it’s an opportunity to “go deeper.” Photo: 42West Faraway Downs isn’t “Australia-plus” or a director’s cut, Luhrmann emphasizes; instead, it’s an opportunity to “go deeper.” Photo: 42West Faraway Downs isn’t “Australia-plus” or a director’s cut, Luhrmann emphasizes; instead, it’s an opportunity to “go deeper. [Read More]

Timothy Olyphant is dusting off his hat (oh, you know the one). The actor is set to reprise his role as Raylan Givens, that smoldering gunslinger, in a miniseries spinoff of FX’s crime drama Justified, which ended in 2015. Justified: City Primeval reunites Olyphant with producers of the original acclaimed series — including creator Graham Yost. The new limited series is set to be based on Elmore Leonard’s novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit — after the original series drew from Leonard’s novella Fire in the Hole and other stories featuring the Givens character. [Read More]

Tina Fey had a nice, long chat with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today. The interview is full of great stuff, of course, including Fey on the 30 Rock episode “TGS Hates Women” (“It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves — whether or not they choose to, as I say, put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and the way women judge each other back and forth for it”), not being allowed to fix your child’s underwear on the subway forever, what she learned from Rachel McAdams, accidentally endorsing Hillary Clinton, how SNL should hire an African American woman, and her continued allegiance to Team Gwyneth: “Gwyneth Paltrow has a great ear or instinct for sketch comedy, because you have to make a quick choice and go with it and she was really good. [Read More]

Before Tina Turner became a pop star, she was a rock pioneer. Turner, who died this week at the age of 83, got her start at 18 years old, frequenting the Manhattan Club in St. Louis to watch Ike Turner’s famed Kings of Rhythm perform. Ike recruited her as a backup singer, and two years later she was the main attraction of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, which scorched up and down the Chitlin’ Circuit, playing highly charged soul and rhythm and blues. [Read More]

Harper Lee. Author Harper Lee has died at the age of 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, AL.com reports. Lee was born and raised in the town, renamed Maycomb in her novels, and attended the University of Alabama before moving to New York City to fulfill her literary ambitions. She spent the 1950s trying her hand at short stories and writing Go Set a Watchman, a novel about the conflict between her idyllic childhood memories and the bitter racism of the Jim Crow South. [Read More]

It’s been seven years since Tom Ford moved from fashion to film with his directorial debut, A Single Man, but perhaps his follow-up, Nocturnal Animals, just needed time to untangle. The dramatic thriller presents two stories in one: In the main story, depressed gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams) is sent a manuscript written by her estranged ex Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), and as she pores over it, we watch the tense tale unfold onscreen. [Read More]

Inside, starring Willem Dafoe, wastes a great premise on dreary execution. It’s common knowledge among New Yorkers that the luxury apartment towers that protrude from the skyline like raised middle fingers are half-empty, vertical ghost towns where oligarchs, investors, and other members of the globe-trotting elite store their money in the form of prime Manhattan real estate that largely goes unoccupied. These vacancies may actually have more to do with how many of those luxury apartments have gone unsold than anything else — it turns out that there’s only so much demand for ultrahigh-end properties — but it’s the emotional truth of the situation that matters more. [Read More]