The girl of Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is not like other girls. She is, for one thing, a vampire, but she's not like other vampires, either. She wears a hijab and prowls the fictional Iranian town called Bad City (actually Bakersfield, Calif.). Her inevitable feeding seems to come as much…
Frederick Wiseman has been making his brand of long, implicitly narrative documentaries about institutions for almost 50 years, and I’ll be damned if his most recent, National Gallery, isn’t among his very finest. The movie, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum, examines the London art museum after which it is…
While watching Juno Temple's exquisite performance in Alexandre Aja's new fantasy/horror/comedy Horns, a name popped into my head: "Winona." In the film, Temple is an angelic and ideal human with a hint of darkness, not unlike the character Winona Ryder played in Edward Scissorhands. Nursing my opinion is the…
If you've ever wondered what it's like to be Keanu Reeves, The Actor in 2014, "it sucks."
In 1994, a South Florida man who goes by the name Gelding was surgically castrated. In 2011, he had his penis removed as well. He's a "nullo": A cisgender man who removes his external genitalia completely as a form of body modification, and he recently agreed to answer our questions—from "why?" to "what do balls…
Imagine a world in which humorous, sharp conversations about race and identity could be had where multiple perspectives are represented—and many of the participants make good points.
Dan Snaith's most recent album as Caribou, Our Love, spans genres from house to prog ballads, all with a pointed sense of warmth. It's among the year's very best releases. The Canadian producer/singer recently told me by phone that the album was intended to give back to those who'd strongly responded to his last…
Music producer Steven Ellison, also known as Flying Lotus, has the kind of career that contemporary artists dream of. He's respected, acclaimed, constantly working, and seems to be having a great time. His wild fifth studio album, You're Dead!, explores the titular concept through boisterous jazz, leftfield hip-hop,…
Oprah Winfrey has scored an interview with Matthew Sandusky, the adopted son of former Penn State University assistant football coach and convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky. Matthew has discussed being abused by Jerry, including on the stand, but this will be his first TV interview since Jerry's 2012 conviction…
We’re 35 floors high above midtown Manhattan and Lee O’Denat occupies the seat across from me. His is a physically-commanding presence—a bull of a man—and I begin to think everything I have read about him up until this point is true. The designer shades. The diamond-encrusted chain. The deceptively knowing smile that…
In 2014, a story about AIDS in San Francisco in 1985 is as relevant as ever. Though it shares subject matter, Chris Mason Johnson's Test is the virtual antithesis of Ryan Murphy and Larry Kramer's survey of the early plague years, The Normal Heart, which aired last month on HBO. Test is smaller in scale, more…
Jonah Hill's name is increasingly becoming synonymous with man-on-man oral sex. On last night's Chelsea Lately, Channing Tatum explained that though he won a bet over the opening weekend gross of 2012's 21 Jump Street that would require Hill to kiss the tip of his dick, he's yet to collect. Again. People will not let…
Last week, reality star, sex-tape maker, singer (or whatever ), and the subject of the most-viewed post in the history of Gawker (NSFW...of course), Farrah Abraham stopped by our offices to promote her foray into erotic fiction, the roman à clef Celebrity Sex Tape: In the Making. Alongside my friend and old Pot…
The following is a True Stories conversation between Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah.
By his own admission, award-winning author Colson Whitehead went on a “strange odyssey” when he journeyed to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. He was on assignment for Grantland, ESPN’s culture website, and had trained for weeks with Helen Ellis, a tournament-hardened card player. But there was just one thing:…
An insane half-hour interview transpired recently when rapper Charles Hamilton walked by a spot on Harlem's 125th Street where someone was filming for the YouTube channel SaNeter.TV. Hamilton was apparently flagged down and had a lot to say about Sonic the Hedgehog, Interscope president Jimmy Iovine, Kanye West,…
Jim Mickle's moody, genre-skipping film Cold in July opens on a terrifying home invasion and only gets crazier from there. Dexter's Michael C. Hall plays Richard, a man who's thrust into a situation he's in no way prepared for, and then finds himself seduced by it. He ends up pursing a path that blurs the line between…
Over the past month, I've watched several people freak out when I've mentioned 19-year-old Chicago singer/rapper Tink's recent song "Don't Tell Nobody." The duet with Jeremih ("Birthday Sex") is compulsively listenable. It's intricately laid out melodrama told in the filthiest of terms. Switching meter nearly every…
Geoff Dyer is one of those writers who resists categorization. His books and essays are usually a hybrid of several genres: reporting, memoir, travelogues, criticism, and humor. What makes most of them great, though, is Dyer's digressive curiosity, his ability to let one realization about his ostensible topic—D.H.…
At 12 p.m. EDT today, the writer Geoff Dyer will drop by Gawker to talk about his new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life on board the USS George H.W. Bush. If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
