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Eighty-seven-year-old filmmaker Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak” is about how changing demographics in an struggling English town called Durham manifest in a crumbling old pub, the last public space that everyone claims as their own. This is Loach’s latest and (according to Loach) final motion picture, and it feels like a summation. It’s as engrossing, thoughtful, heartfelt, angry, hopeful, and altogether…

I often wish that I could still hear George Carlin riffing on the news. But I can’t, and it’s good that I can’t, because he died in 2008, and trying to pretend to digitally resurrect him would be obscene, even if you weren’t making a buck from it.  Apparently the creators of an unauthorized posthumous AI-garbage version of a new George…

One girl was asked about a significant Supreme Court case and picked “the one with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.”  Someone thought it was a good idea to have the opening night icebreaker activities include a bracelet station and cupcake decorating. And yet, the worst political judgment in “Girls State,” the documentary follow-up to the award-winning…

This series presents a different essay by a different writer on the first Friday of the month. Each one starts from the premise “The Future of the Movies.” The writer is free to expound on that title in whatever way they choose. It could be streaming, theatrical, AI, tech, representation, or anything else that comes to mind.…