There was a time when Louis Theroux was the best documentary-maker alive. Not the most famous, not the flashiest — the best. He had a gift for making dangerous people feel comfortable enough to hang themselves with their own words.

His technique was deceptively simple: show up, look confused, ask the obvious question nobody else dared ask, and let the awkward silences do the heavy lifting.

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer.

The results were extraordinary. He immersed himself in the Westboro Baptist Church and revealed something more than fire-and-brimstone rhetoric — that hatred has a morning routine, eats cereal, and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.

He walked into San Quentin and found the prison’s strict social architecture more fascinating than horrifying. He sat with alcoholics dying in a hospital liver ward and captured something devastating without once reaching for a violin. He starred in a porn film fully clothed, somehow maintaining both his dignity and his curiosity.

His early work was morally serious without being moralistic — an almost impossible balance that he struck repeatedly.

That Theroux is gone.

Concern troll

In his place stands something considerably less interesting: a concerned therapist in training with a camera crew, packaging society’s oddballs for an audience that already knows what it thinks of them.

His latest Netflix outing, "Inside the Manosphere," is the clearest evidence yet. Theroux plunges into the world of online alpha-male influencers — Harrison Sullivan, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines, Sneako — tracking their revenue streams, their rhetoric, and their relentless contempt for women.

Miami apartments. Spanish nightclubs. Podcast sets where female guests are humiliated for content.

Sullivan funnels Telegram followers to OnlyFans accounts for kickbacks while publicly mocking the creators. Waller hawks Andrew Tate’s $49-a-month “university.” Gaines, a man of genuine venom, performs dominance for the camera like someone who has mistaken cruelty for confidence.

The material is genuinely ripe. These men are running sophisticated grift operations dressed up as philosophy, monetizing male loneliness and directing the resulting rage at all women. They deserve scrutiny.

The problem is that Theroux no longer scrutinizes. He pathologizes.

Practiced horror

Every interaction becomes a therapeutic probe. Every exchange is framed as evidence of something “disturbing.” The wide-eyed incredulity — once a genuine performance of curiosity — now reads as practiced horror for a largely left-leaning platform.

When Sullivan admits bluntly that he would never have found an audience doing wholesome content — “If I’d just done good things, I would never have blown up” — it is the most honest moment in the film.

Theroux treats it as a tragedy. It is simply capitalism.

Sullivan knows exactly what he is doing.

The real story is not that these men are broken. It is that they have correctly identified a lucrative market of young men who feel abandoned by mainstream culture — and are bleeding them dry. That is the documentary.

Theroux keeps making a different one — a morality play in which he is cast as the bewildered voice of reason.

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Prepackaged pandering

The irony is that his presence amplifies the very thing he deplores. Sullivan’s mother, in a sharp moment the film almost buries, asks the obvious question: If you find this so reprehensible, why are you publicizing it?

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer — roughly as effective as asking Putin to send Zelenskyy a fruit basket.

He is outmatched by people who have spent years controlling their image, and he does not seem to notice. These are seasoned sharks who have fielded far worse and treat the beanpole Brit like a speed bump on the way to their next revenue stream.

What made the early work so extraordinary was Theroux’s apparent absence of agenda. He let meth addicts, dementia patients, Scientologists, and porn stars speak for themselves and trusted audiences to draw their own conclusions. He did not editorialize.

The manosphere documentary editorializes constantly — each segment arriving labeled, prejudged, prepackaged for viewers who tuned in already convinced.

This is what woke documentary-making looks like at its most comfortable: confirming what the audience believes in a way that seems like investigation.

It is virtuous voyeurism — and painfully dull television.

The manosphere — equal parts genuine grievance and cynical exploitation — is a real and fascinating phenomenon. The young men being farmed for subscription fees and manufactured resentment deserve actual examination, not a wagging finger and a worried look.

Theroux was once the person who could have done that.

Watch "Drinking to Oblivion." Watch "The Most Hated Family in America." Watch a man doing the hardest thing in journalism — entering without a verdict and finding something real on the other side.

Sadly, that man traded his instincts for a Netflix brief and never looked back.

He got paid. The audience got a lecture.

Dreary 'Saturday Night Live: UK' is dead on arrival

It took less than a minute. Not for the show to find its rhythm — that never arrived — but for viewers to reach for the remote.

A more generous critic would say "Saturday Night Live: UK" stumbled out of the gate. Someone actually grounded in reality would say it arrived DOA, was resuscitated by optimism, flatlined again during the opening credits, and spent the rest of its run time as evidence that nobody in the commissioning process had ever actually watched British television.

The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don't do collective euphoria on command.

The opening sketch — a Downing Street caricature so limp that it needed medical attention — felt like it was written by people who had heard of the place the way most people have heard of Uzbekistan: aware that it exists, entirely unclear on the details. Keir Starmer reduced to a bed-wetting schoolboy: accurate enough, but executed with all the surgical precision of a drunk toddler.

Satire requires stones. This was neutered at conception

Fey's lemon

The host was former "SNL" head writer Tina Fey — parachuted in to anchor the spin-off in the history of television's most durable comedy franchise.

Rather than evoking "Saturday Night Live," however, her appearance called to mind "30 Rock" — Fey’s own sitcom about a sketch comedy show flailing within an absurdly corporatized NBC.

She stood there less like a master of ceremonies than like a faintly embarrassed consultant, as if tasked with explaining why this seemingly gratuitous product was actually a masterstroke of synergy and brand extension. You could almost hear the Jack Donaghy pitch behind it: familiar logo, international rollout, scalable format. Somewhere between the greenlighting and the greenroom, the only premise that mattered — making people laugh — had been quietly lost.

The audience noticed immediately. They always do. Forty seconds. One minute. Five, if you were feeling charitable. The reactions weren't angry. They were worse. They were bored. There is no harsher verdict for comedy than indifference.

Stupid and sublime

It wasn’t always this way, of course. "Saturday Night Live" was once genuinely great. Not good. Not fine. Great. Belushi, Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy — dangerous, deranged, alive. Bill Murray doing a sort of dollar-store Sinatra. Chris Farley destroying every piece of furniture within reach. Phil Hartman doing impressions so precise that the subjects should have taken it personally. They probably did.

These were performers who understood that live television was a dare, not a format, and they took it every single week. Comedy that felt like it could go wrong at any moment, and sometimes did, and was better for it. Sharp, stupid, sublime in equal measure.

Those days are long gone — the show swallowed by Trump derangement syndrome and the passive-aggressive ritual of swiping at conservatives until the writers' room mistook a political position for a punch line.

In its prime, it was still political, but at least it was anchored in something real — American culture, fast, furious, and occasionally brilliant. If today's "SNL" is but a degraded facsimile of the show in its prime, this transatlantic fiasco is a facsimile of that facsimile: edges blurred, ink fading, soul entirely absent.

CBS Photo Archive/Monika Graff/Getty Images

Fawlty hour

The failure here is structural, not superficial. British comedy is built on irony, understatement, and a very specific species of darkness. "Fawlty Towers." "Brass Eye." "The Office." "I'm Alan Partridge." Comedy that watches you squirm and enjoys it. Comedy that finds the precise point of maximum discomfort and builds a home there. Comedy forged in restraint and bad weather, in class anxiety and institutional distrust, in the particularly British conviction that authority is always, at some level, ridiculous. You cannot import that.

If British comedy runs on slow-burning cringe and the precise calibration of discomfort, the "SNL" format runs on volume — loud, broad, relentlessly American, built around celebrity cameos and political impressions that reset with each news cycle and evaporate by Sunday morning.

Hiring Lorne Michaels doesn't transplant the institution any more than putting a McDonald's in a country farmhouse makes it rural. The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don't do collective euphoria on command. They do collective embarrassment, the kind that makes you leave the room on someone else's behalf, change your name, and book a one-way ticket to the aforementioned Uzbekistan.

Nothing much

Crucially, nobody asked for this. Nobody petitioned. Nobody wrote in. Sky's decision to commission eight episodes before a single one had even aired suggests the company was already nervous — hedging against failure by pretending it was a plan.

The deeper problem is one of fundamental incompatibility — a cultural mismatch so obvious that it's almost impressive that no one in the commissioning process named it aloud. Or perhaps they did and were overruled by someone with a spreadsheet. Comedy, at its best, feels dangerous. This felt focus-grouped. Safe. Sanitized. A show that promised the sun, moon, and stars but instead delivered, with full confidence and considerable expense, a urine-scented underpass.

Of course, the next episode could be great. Revelatory. The best television in years. But judging by the first, almost anything else would have been better. Including nothing. Nothing would have been better. Nothing, at least, doesn't waste your Saturday night.

Is the GOP’s hyper-fixation on the SAVE Act allowing a much darker threat to fester?

The SAVE Act, which would require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, is currently stalled in the Senate. Republicans, led by President Trump and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), are adamant on pushing it through, as it prevents noncitizen voting.

But is the GOP so hyper-fixated on passing it that it’s glossing over an even bigger threat?

According to Blaze Media’s Daniel Horowitz, the answer is yes.

“All you hear going into this new week is ‘the Save Act, the Save Act.’ Do you see what minutia that is when you look at the magnitude of what we're facing just with Islamic immigration?” he asks.

On this episode of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” the no-nonsense conservative analyst breaks down why the SAVE Act is actually a distraction from more pressing immigration issues.

“We basically let in ... several million people that believe in at least civilization jihad, don't like America, cultivate a climate where you have several hundred thousand people that downright support terrorism as a form of fulfilling their jihad,” says Horowitz.

In light of this looming threat, the SAVE Act is “so small potatoes,” he argues, calling it “an idolatrous bill“ that ignores the real problem.

“It's illegals being counted in the census, noncitizens being counted in the census, bringing in mass waves of people that become citizens and legally vote Democrat. That is a much bigger issue than the actual illegal voting,” Horowitz declares.

“Having Hezbollah, Hamas, Shabab, and Al-Qaeda-supporting Muslims in the millions in this country is a much bigger deal than the freaking SAVE Act,” he continues.

But stricter vetting isn’t the answer, he says.

Citing his interview with former Muslim Danny Burmawi, Horowitz contends that Islam is “not a religion” so much as it’s “a state” with its own “system of governance.”

Unlike in the Middle East, where governments often have to limit or modify strict Islamic practices to keep the state functional and avoid total dysfunction, Muslim immigrants in the West are free to express support for jihad and terrorism.

“We're trying to run our state, and they're able to actually implement a full unfettered, unadulterated Islamic state within the confines of our state. And that's how you have a greater concentration of jihad now in the West than you have even in the East,” says Horowitz.

Instead of focusing on the SAVE Act, he argues that the GOP’s attention should be fixated on “[shutting] off the new flow” of Muslim migrants and denaturalizing and deporting those here legally who support foreign terrorists.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” he declares. “States are going to have to say no to mass migration — illegal and legal.”

To hear more of Horowitz’s in-depth breakdown, watch the full episode above.

Is your baby formula safe? Florida finds heavy metals in 16 of 24 top brands

Most parents who purchase baby formula trust that if the product is on the supermarket shelf, it must be safe for their child, but according to findings from the Healthy Florida First initiative, many of the top formula brands tested positive for heavy metals.

The state-led program, spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis (R), first lady Casey DeSantis, and Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo through the Florida Department of Health, aims to build a healthier Florida through independent testing and publication of contaminants in everyday foods.

On a recent episode of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” Horowitz interviewed Casey DeSantis about what Florida’s health initiative uncovered about 24 top-selling baby formulas and what parents can do to ensure that their children are receiving the best nutrition.

A Consumer Reports investigation released in March 2025 found potentially harmful levels of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, in some of the 41 baby formulas tested. Around the same time, HHS and the FDA announced Operation Stork Speed, which increased testing for heavy metals and contaminants, reviewed nutrient standards, and strengthened oversight of infant formula safety.

Despite this initiative, DeSantis says that according to infant formula testing conducted by Florida’s Department of Health, “there hasn’t been much change at all.”

“And honestly, since we had our results coming out, I haven't heard anything from some of these baby formula manufacturers. And so it's like at what point in time is enough enough?” she says, calling metal toxicity in baby formula “unconscionable and unacceptable.”

Out of the 24 baby formulas tested, Florida’s Department of Health found that 16 contained one or more heavy metals exceeding current safety standards.

“Could you give us a summary of those shocking findings?” asks Horowitz.

“Sixteen out of the 24 had high levels of mercury. Two had lead. These are problematic heavy metals, right? They don't just leave the body. They're there for a while,” says DeSantis, “and our surgeon general said, you know, when you're exposed to this early in life in these quantities over the course of a year or two, your risk of getting cancer goes up exponentially.”

“I would encourage moms and dads and grandparents to go to exposingfoodtoxins.com because there you can see specifically which ones are better than others,” she adds.

“Don't tell me it's the manufacturing process and there's nothing that we can do, because certainly there are some manufacturers that are doing it better. So we should, as consumers, push to drive change because that's the right thing to do on behalf of families.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the full interview above.

'Why I Am Not an Atheist' exposes incoherence of non-belief

Atheism likes to present itself as the adult in the room. Faith, by contrast, is cast as a childish indulgence for people afraid of the dark.

Christopher Beha’s "Why I Am Not an Atheist" examines this framing and demonstrates, with real precision, why atheism itself may be the most adolescent worldview of them all.

Atheism has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning.

This isn’t a book of defensive apologetics. Beha doesn’t hurl Scripture at doubters or claim that God can be demonstrated like a physics equation. Instead, he treats atheism as a coherent position and then tests it against reality. He walks its reasoning to its natural conclusion and reports back on the damage. What he finds there isn’t liberation but emptiness — sometimes dressed up as sophistication, sometimes as certainty, but emptiness all the same.

Godless

Beha’s journey begins in familiar territory. Like many sane, decent people, he wanted honesty. He wanted to “look the world frankly in the face,” to set aside inherited beliefs that, at that stage of his life, he believed couldn’t withstand scrutiny. God, to him, seemed unnecessary. Worse, He seemed embarrassing. Atheism, on the other hand, felt like intellectual courage.

Beha embraced the godless creed at first, wholeheartedly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

Rather than joining the professional atheist class — the permanently outraged and faintly condescending set, à la Harris and Dawkins, who mistake self-indulgence for insight — Beha asks a far riskier question: What replaces God once He’s gone? Not as a thought exercise, but in real life. In daily choices. In suffering. In death.

Here, the book begins to shine.

Motion and chaos

Beha identifies two dominant atheist positions. The first is scientific materialism, which holds that only what can be measured is real. Everything else — mind, love, conscience, beauty — is reduced to physical process. Choice becomes brain chemistry. Human life is explained as motion and chance, sorted into probabilities.

The second is a newer, trendier alternative: romantic idealism. Instead of reducing the world to atoms, it centers everything on the self. Meaning is something you create. Truth is something you feel. The highest good is authenticity, and the highest crime is judgment. God disappears, and the individual assumes His place.

Both, Beha argues, fail in opposite but equally revealing ways.

Materialism reduces the human person to a biological incident. Consciousness becomes a chemical glitch. Love becomes an evolutionary strategy. It is an impressively sterile system, one that explains everything except why anyone should bother getting out of bed.

Romantic idealism reacts against this coldness by putting the individual will on the throne. The view seems warmer, and perhaps it is, but it is still incoherent. If everyone creates meaning, meaning ceases to exist. If truth is personal, truth dissolves. The self becomes both king and casualty, crowned with responsibility and locked in solitude.

Between them, Beha shows, modern atheism swings between delusion and despair. That may explain why so many of its most visible champions — from Bill Maher to Ricky Gervais to Penn Jillette — sound less liberated than irritated. Atheism can take things apart, but it can’t hold them together.

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Philosophical freeloading

What makes this critique effective is Beha’s refusal to hide behind abstractions. He doesn’t pretend that these systems fail only in theory. They fail in lived experience. They fail when existential angst arrives uninvited.

Atheism, Beha observes, has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning. It wants human rights without a human giver. What looks like intellectual bravery is closer to philosophical freeloading.

Beha is especially critical of the arrogance that often accompanies unbelief. Atheism flatters itself as fearless while demanding a strangely narrow universe — one small enough to fit inside a laboratory or a podcast episode. Anything that resists measurement is dismissed as childish. Transcendence is treated as something reserved for uncultured troglodytes.

Christianity, by contrast, has never sold comfort by making reality smaller. It doesn’t reduce the world to what feels manageable. It claims that meaning is real whether we want it or not, that God isn’t a projection of human wishes, and that right and wrong aren’t personal inventions. It doesn’t erase suffering. Instead, it meets it head-on. To be alive is to bear pain, and to bear pain is to be alive.

The way back

It is from within that hard-earned contrast — after years in the wilderness of unbelief — that Beha finds his way back, not to a vague faith, but to Christianity itself and finally to the Catholic Church. This isn’t a story of conquest. It’s an acknowledgment that atheism, however confident it sounds, left him more miserable and taught him to call that misery freedom — something he came to see clearly when his brother Jim nearly died in a car crash and later when he himself faced death with stage-three lymphoma.

Crucially, Beha isn’t arguing that faith banishes doubt. He would laugh at that idea. He remains a skeptic in the classical sense — aware of human limits, suspicious of tidy conclusions, allergic to ideological shortcuts. Faith, as he presents it, is the decision to live as though truth, goodness, and meaning are not clever hallucinations generated by neurons killing time.

For conservative Christians, "Why I Am Not an Atheist" matters because it doesn’t preach. It doesn’t wring its hands over secularism or bulldoze unbelievers. It does something far more damaging: It lets atheism talk, at length. Given enough space, its confidence begins to crack, its claims lose shape, and its bravado gives way to a worldview that can’t deliver what it promises. Atheism isn’t undone here by counterargument, but by relentless exposure.

In an age when disbelief markets itself as adulthood and faith as regression, Beha offers a bracing reversal. Atheism, he suggests, is a creed without the slightest bit of substance, built entirely on what it denies.

Christianity, whatever one’s denomination, remains the only worldview bold enough to say that life matters, suffering is not pointless, and belief answers to what is, not what we want.

Forget Greenland — we’re losing the real green land that feeds America

The world is abuzz with chatter about the United States’ pursuit of Greenland, but Daniel Horowitz, Blaze Media host of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” says we ought to consider prioritizing a different kind of green land: “our pastures, our farms, our ranches.”

America’s food security, or lack thereof, is an issue that should deeply concern every American, he says. Between rising beef prices, the “endless shrinkage of ranchers exiting the farming business,” “the consolidation of corporate farms,” the “corporate monopoly of meat processors,” “inflation-driven land depreciation,” and the “government’s steering capital to data centers instead of ranches,” America’s ability to feed her people is growing weaker by the day.

Horowitz confesses he has grown weary of the Trump administration’s geopolitical distractions and obsession with building AI data centers when “the future of [America’s] food security is what matters.”

“We should be pushing for a Manhattan project for cheap and abundant food, for more ranchers, more farmers, more utilization of the land to produce American-made beef rather than cloud-based AI slop that's actually now about to pop as a bubble and is not really getting us anything,” he says.

Yet Horowitz sees this prioritization not as a purely conservative misstep, but as a clever pivot by the left.

The shift toward prioritizing AI over food production, he argues, is just progressives’ latest trick in their long game: “jiu-jitsuing” conservatives’ support for “functional energy” and funneling it toward “building their surveillance, transhumanist cloud” to create a world where “we own nothing, are dependent on government,” small businesses (including ranchers and farmers) are crushed, and we’re all forced to “put our lives on the cloud.”

Based on several Davos speeches delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum conference, it appears that fossil fuels are back in style with the elites, but Horowitz warns that their plan is to “siphon it all off for their cloud-based, transhumanist" trashing of the internet.”

“Consuming all of our land — not for food, farming, ranching — but for cloud. That's what this is all about,” he says.

He accuses the Trump administration of “literally digging our own grave” by handing power-hungry elites tax breaks, streamlined regulations, and priority land access for massive data centers, all while pushing policies that would block states and localities from using basic zoning rules to safeguard farmland and ranching.

In short, their efforts are paving the way for the destruction of farmland to build “massive power-sucking dung holes,” where our data will be stored and likely used to surveil us.

What this administration should be doing, Horowitz says, is “getting out of the way of ranchers and farmers so that we have safe, healthy, abundant, cheap food and protein in this country.”

To learn more about the boots-on-the-ground fight for food security in America, Horowitz interviews Texas cattle rancher and co-founder of the Beef Initiative Cole Bolton.

To hear their conversation, watch the full episode above.

'28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' brings new life to horror franchise

Like the post-apocalyptic Britain of the "28 Days Later" franchise, Hollywood has become a wasteland, teeming with the stripped-down, lethally efficient shells of once-vital creations. Nostalgia-driven reboots swarm the multiplex, satisfying audience cravings for familiarity and studio appetites for certainty — even as they leave the surrounding creative landscape increasingly barren.

This year's "28 Years Later" could just as easily have been another of these living-dead productions. While previous installment "28 Weeks Later" (2007) — made with nominal participation from the original creative team — delivered competent scares, it hardly cried out for a follow-up.

The movie is littered with British cultural references — decontextualized and repurposed by survivors struggling to find meaning in a world they no longer understand.

But the return of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland proved worth the wait. "28 Years Later" demonstrated that this universe could still surprise, ending with a tantalizingly bizarre coda in which our hero Spike is rescued by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his blonde-wigged, track-suited minions. Clearly the infected are not the only menace stalking the British countryside.

Charity cases

"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" picks up right after this moment, confirming our suspicions that Spike's troubles have just begun. After a gruesome kind of initiation, Spike is forcibly enlisted as one the "Jimmys," who turn out to be a gang of satanic killers. Led by Jimmy Crystal, who believes himself to be the son of "Old Nick," they prowl the land inflicting gruesome ritualized violence — which they call "charity" — on those unfortunate enough to meet them.

While Garland returns as screenwriter, Boyle (who stays on as producer) cedes the director’s chair to Nia DaCosta, whose striking use of lingering close-ups and tightly framed compositions inject the film with a raw, anarchic energy. The result is a legacy sequel that both pays homage to its origins and reimagines them — one that weaves graphic violence together with incisive observations on culture, faith, and survival in a world irreversibly altered by catastrophe.

Doctor Sleep

Many of those observations come straight from the kindly and philosophical Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an eccentric recluse who provided shelter for runaway Spike and his dying mother in "28 Years Later." In this grisly sequel, the iodine-covered, blowdart-wielding former physician is searching for a cure to the rage virus, using an infected “alpha” zombie — whom he names Samson — as his pet project.

He also continues work on the titular bone temple, a memorial to the outbreak’s victims, until his optimism and ingenuity is tested by the new and horrifying human adversary we met in the beginning.

While Boyle’s 2002 film focused on urban chaos, this installment widens its lens, exploring the virus’ impact across the countryside while delving into deeper philosophical terrain. Beneath the skin-flaying, stabbings, "Mortal Kombat"-style spine removals, and Iron Maiden needle drops lies a poignant meditation on a once-beautiful country sliding into social and spiritual decay.

This is England

DaCosta, an American director, deftly preserves the distinctly English identity of the original films. The movie is littered with British cultural references — decontextualized and repurposed by survivors struggling to find meaning in a world they no longer understand.

The Jimmys, with their blonde wigs, tracksuits, and gold jewelry, are intentionally modeled after Jimmy Savile, one of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders. In this universe — where society collapsed in 2002, years before Savile’s real-world crimes were exposed — the cult reveres him as a benevolent, almost mythical figure. Their so-called acts of "charity" grotesquely invert Savile’s public image of philanthropy, turning it into a rationale for cruelty and sadism.

The dynamic between Sir Jimmy and Kelson is magnetic. O’Connell and Fiennes deliver outstanding performances, moving seamlessly between surrealism and melancholy. Some of the film’s most compelling moments occur when these two simply share the screen in conversation.

Sir Jimmy and Kelson represent competing philosophies of survival. In desperate times, humanity creates belief systems — sometimes as tools of power, sometimes as mechanisms of self-preservation. Through these two figures, Garland weaves a thoughtful exploration of evil, faith, and meaning.

Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

Feral faith

Religious symbolism runs throughout the film. The Jimmys repurpose Savile’s catchphrase “Howzat!” as a ritual chant — stripped of its original meaning and reconstituted as a signifier of violence. Kelson, meanwhile, assumes the role of a secular creator. His humanist liturgy centers on music and literature, which function as sacred texts connecting him to the past and preserving his sanity.

Samson’s transformation becomes an allegory for rebirth: emerging from the hell of infection into renewal. Where the biblical Adam becomes aware of his nakedness after eating from the tree of knowledge, Samson’s recovery inspires modesty as he clothes himself with memories of his return. It is the Fall in reverse — self-awareness as ascension, rebirth without grace.

"The Bone Temple" manages to inject genuine life into a franchise nearly 25 years old. I may regret saying this, but I am genuinely curious to see where the story goes next — especially with Boyle returning to direct the third and final installment. The film’s closing scene teases the return of a familiar face, and John Murphy’s fuzzed-out guitar theme suggests that hope remains, for both the survivors and the fans.

Orthodox saint meets Chicago gang life in gritty crime flick 'Moses the Black'

50 Cent is going from sin to sanctity.

Hot on the heels of his recent Netflix documentary on the debauched downfall of hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, the rapper turned producer is set to release an urban crime drama inspired by the life of fourth-century Ethiopian monk Moses the Black.

Even in our compromised state, saints remain scandalous and alluring precisely because they cut against our deepest desires and despair.

Fans of Fox Nation’s "Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints" will remember the violent bandit turned desert-dwelling ascetic as one of the series' most fascinating subjects. Officially recognized by Pope Leo XIII in 1887, the former slave has long been venerated as the patron saint of nonviolence and is widely praised as a symbol of the power of peace and repentance.

Out for blood

"Moses the Black," a loose retelling of that story set against the backdrop of modern-day Chicago, follows Malik (Omar Epps), a gang leader fresh out of prison and seeking to avenge his murdered friend.

Complicating his quest his is grandmother, an Orthodox Christian who gives him an icon of St. Moses, whom she describes as a "saint who was also a gang member." Haunted by frustration, loss, and a lifetime of sins, Malik starts having visions of the saint, who warns him that the bloody path he has embarked upon is one he will regret.

"Moses" — which also features hip-hop notables Wiz Khalifa and Quavo — makes for an interesting companion piece to director Yelena Popovic’s previous outing, 2021 St. Nektarios biopic "Man of God." Where that film depicts sanctity as something preserved through obedience and suffering, "Moses" imagines it reclaimed from disorder.

Mean streets

Malik navigates an inner city filled with dealers and enforcers locked into violent criminal lives, casually killing rivals or shooting up funerals over petty grudges. These sequences are among the film’s darkest and do not soften their portrayal of brutality or drug use.

"Moses" is clearly a personal project for the platinum-selling artist born Curtis Jackson, whose own background mirrors Malik's. Raised by a single mother in Jamaica, Queens — herself a drug dealer who was murdered when he was 8 — Jackson entered the drug trade at a young age. After barely surviving an attack by a rival in 2000, Jackson released his debut "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" in 2003.

Although that album cemented Jackson's association with the violence and materialism of gangsta rap, its cover found him wearing a jewel-encrusted cross necklace. The tension between survival and transformation is one Jackson understands firsthand.

As he has said:

I believe in God. I didn't survive being shot nine times for nothing. I didn't claw my way out of the 'hood just 'cause it was something to do. I know I've got a purpose, a reason for being on this planet. I don't think I've done everything I'm supposed to do yet. But I do know this: I ain't going nowhere 'til I've done it all.

Redemption song

There is something unsettling and compelling about the lives of saints. Even in our compromised state, they remain scandalous and alluring precisely because they cut against our deepest desires and despair. The film’s greatest strength is its depiction of how Catholics and Orthodox Christians turn to saints during moments of trial, seeking models of repentance and change — models Malik strains toward but does not easily inhabit.

Steven Ferdman/GC Images/Getty Images

The film’s ambitions, however, exceed its budget. Extensive handheld camerawork — whether a stylistic or budgetary choice — sits uneasily beside green-screen flashbacks and CGI-heavy desert scenes. The rough Chicago footage clashes with these elements, and the film might have benefited from a tighter focus on Malik’s interior struggle. Exaggerated performances from the supporting cast further push many scenes into melodrama.

Despite its "faith-based" trappings, "Moses the Black" is emphatically not a family film. It includes graphic violence, coarse language, and crude sexual innuendo, narrowing its audience to those inclined to receive its warning. Still, its central claim — that mercy extends even to the gravest sinners — lands with force in a culture starved for hope.

"Moses the Black" will be released through Fathom Entertainment on January 30.

Rush reunites. Let the hate begin.

The Rush reunion announcement landed like a Neil Peart cymbal crash heard from two continents away.

For some, it was a benediction. For others, a blasphemy. In America especially, Rush has always been a band that splits the room in two. On one side: devotion bordering on reverence. On the other: a curled lip, a sigh, a muttered word like “soulless” or “show-off.”

Rush endured because they never chased cool. Cool is perishable, but craft is not.

Few great bands inspire such loyalty and such irritation at the same time. Even fewer manage it without changing who they are.

A Farewell to Kings

The power trio we know as Rush formed in 1974 in Toronto, three young men chasing something bigger than barroom rock. They were loud, fast, and committed to mastery. As the years passed, they grew tighter, more disciplined, more deliberate. While other bands burned out or sold out, Rush stayed true.

That mindset carried them for four decades. Album after album. Tour after tour. By the time they bowed out in 2015, Rush had become one of the most reliable live acts in rock history. No scandals (despite a well-documented affection for Bolivian marching powder). The farewell felt final, especially as drummer Peart’s health declined. When he died in 2020, the door seemed closed for good.

Which is why this reunion lands so satisfyingly. It doesn’t feel forced. It doesn’t feel desperate. It feels natural. Two old friends picking up guitars, laughing through familiar songs, and realizing the music still matters to millions.

To others, it matters in the way a neighbor’s power drill matters — piercing, relentless, and likely to trigger a migraine.

Working Man

Rush has never fit comfortably into the American rock myth. The band wasn't blues-rooted, booze-soaked, or born of Southern swag. Geddy Lee sang like a caffeinated banshee. Alex Lifeson mixed power with precision. And Neil Peart — the irreplaceable center — treated drums like an Olympic event.

To rock traditionalists, however, something about this just felt off. Rock, to them, was meant to feel dark and dangerous. Think Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Who, AC/DC. Part of the gig was bringing chaos — both on and off stage. Treating hotel rooms like demolition sites and sanity as optional. Consider the late, great Ozzy Osbourne: a man who built a Hall of Fame career out of conduct that would have ended most working lives in a padded room.

Rush never subscribed to that model. And for a certain kind of American critic, that alone was enough to raise suspicion.

Rock wasn’t supposed to sound so organized. It wasn’t supposed to sound like the band had talked things through. So the complaints piled up. Too clean. Too lame. “Cheesy” and “corny” became the easy shortcuts, a way to dismiss what they didn’t want to engage with.

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Limelight

Take “Tom Sawyer,” still my personal favorite. Purists love to pick it apart. The synth line is too bright. The lyrics are too earnest. The chorus too triumphant. It doesn’t brood.

But that’s the point. “Tom Sawyer” isn’t trying to sound dangerous. The aim isn’t menace but momentum. It captures motion, confidence, and propulsion — three qualities rock critics often mistake for shallowness. Look past the childish nitpicking, and what’s left is undeniable. A song that still fills arenas, still hits hard, still makes people feel 10 feet tall.

For some critics, Rush was the band you loved if you owned graph paper and color-coded your homework. Rush's music was for the kids who finished the test early and then checked their answers. Not rebels, not wreckers, but students of the thing itself. In rock culture, that kind of seriousness was treated like a social crime.

Subdivisions

Rush is hardly alone in this. Steely Dan took the same beating, dismissed as music for dental offices, waiting rooms, and people who alphabetize their spice racks, despite writing some of the sharpest, most venomous songs of the era. Yes was mocked as bloated and indulgent. Genesis, especially after Peter Gabriel left, got the same treatment.

America has always had a complicated relationship with genuine greatness. It celebrates brilliance, but only when it looks accidental. Genius is best received if it arrives late, drunk, and a little out of control.

You see this pattern everywhere. Adam Sandler spent decades being treated like a joke because his films made money and audiences laughed until they nearly lost bladder control. Jim Carrey wasn’t taken seriously until he stopped being funny and started looking permanently unwell. Rush refused that trade and paid the cultural price.

Headlong Flight

What the reunion clarifies — especially now, in an age of irony fatigue — is that Rush endured because they never chased cool. Cool is perishable, but craft is not. When Lee and Lifeson talk about laughing while jamming, about the music “dispelling dark clouds,” they’re describing something purists often forget. Music is allowed to be joyful. It’s allowed to be exhilarating without being mystical. It can be thrilling without pretending to be profound every second.

The dark humor is that Rush’s biggest sin may have been optimism. In an era increasingly allergic to it, they believed in improvement — musical, personal, even societal. That’s unfashionable.

Cynicism sells. Rage Against the Machine built an entire brand on permanent fury, screaming about “the system” while cashing checks from it. Nine Inch Nails turned self-loathing into an aesthetic. Nirvana mattered because they captured the feeling that nothing worked and no one was coming to fix it. Misery read as honesty. Anger read as depth. Enjoyment, by contrast, looks unserious.

But why? We’re here for a good time, not a long one. Rush understood that early.

Music doesn’t always need to diagnose the human condition. Sometimes it just needs to move, lift, and hit you square in the chest. Half a century on, they’re back. Not to win over the skeptics, who never wanted convincing anyway. But to reward the faithful and quietly remind everyone else that having a good time isn’t a crime.

How the right got Dave Chappelle wrong

For years, Dave Chappelle has been treated as a kind of honorary dissident on the right. Not because he ever pledged allegiance, but because he irritated the correct people. He mocked pronouns, needled sanctimony, and refused to bow. That was enough. In a culture addicted to easy binaries, irritation became endorsement. Chappelle was recast as the anti-woke jester, the last free man in a room full of rules.

"The Unstoppable..." puts an end to that fantasy.

The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns.

As the Netflix special begins, Chappelle emerges on stage wearing a jacket emblazoned with Colin Kaepernick’s name across the back, a symbol doing more work than most monologues. It is declarative. Kaepernick, a distinctly mediocre quarterback who parlayed a declining football career into a lucrative role as a full-time political brand, has long functioned more as an abstraction than as an athlete. His protest became performative, his grievance a commodity, his kneel a credential. Before a word is spoken, the audience is told where power, sympathy, and grievance will be placed. Identity is not the backdrop. Quite the opposite. It’s the billboard.

Black and white

From there, the special settles into a familiar groove. Race becomes the organizing principle, the master key, the lens through which every topic is filtered and fixed. America is again framed as a racist hellscape, a uniquely cruel experiment, a place where whiteness looms as a near-mythical menace.

This is not observation so much as obsession. The fixation risks alienating white viewers almost immediately. Some in the audience likely sense it. Others — liberal self-flagellators by instinct — laugh along anyway, even as they become the punch line of nearly every joke.

Chappelle takes aim at Elon Musk, at Trump, at the culture of DOGE-era absurdity, but the jokes rarely travel. They circle. Musk becomes less a human eccentric and more a symbol of tech-bro whiteness run amok. Trump is reduced to a prop, wheeled on whenever the set needs a familiar villain. That might be forgivable — useful, even — if the material pushed somewhere unexpected. It doesn’t. For a comedian of Chappelle’s ability, too much of the set feels curiously unambitious.

Left hook

The most telling moment comes in Chappelle’s account of Jack Johnson. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, endured explicit racism. That history is real. That is not in dispute. What is striking is how Chappelle treats that history. Johnson becomes less a man of his time and more a stand-in for black people in the present, besieged by the same “demonic white man.”

And so Chappelle conflates Johnson's struggles with with the lives of rappers T.I. and the late Nipsey Hussle — and celebrates all three heroes for opposing white America.

As BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock recently posted on X:

This comedy special exposes [Chappelle] as highly controlled opposition, the ultimate plant, a fraud. He pretends to be a fearless speaker of truth to power. It's laughable. No one with a brain can witness the Charlie Kirk assassination and then argue/suggest that Nipsey Hussle, T.I., and Jack Johnson were/are the real rebels, the real threats to American hegemony. Dave quoted Jack Johnson as saying his life was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. He was a boxer with the worldview of a modern gangsta rapper.

Some kings?

And then comes Chappelle’s praise of Saudi Arabia.

Not cautiously. Not ironically. He recounts performing at a comedy festival in Riyadh, openly boasting about the size of the paycheck. He describes feeling freer speaking there than in the United States. Freer. In a society where speech is monitored, dissent is criminalized, and punishment still includes public canings and amputations.

The audience laughs on schedule, applauding with the enthusiasm of trained sea lions. I found myself wondering why.

There is something almost surreal about hearing a man who has spent years describing America as uniquely oppressive extol the virtues of a monarchy where speech is tolerated only when it is toothless. The contradiction is never addressed. It simply floats past, buoyed by bravado and bank balance.

This isn’t hypocrisy in the cheap sense. It is something more revealing — and easier to miss because Chappelle is such a gifted orator. His moral compass isn’t anchored to freedom, but to grievance. America is condemned because it fails to live up to an ideal. Saudi Arabia is praised because it pays well and demands little beyond discretion.

It would be easier if "The Unstoppable..." were simply bad. It is not. Chappelle remains a master of timing. His cadence still carries. The problem is less talent than trajectory.

Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images

Punching inward

What once felt dangerous now feels dutiful. What once cut across power now reinforces a different orthodoxy. Chappelle no longer punches up or down so much as inward, tightening his world until everything is interpreted through race alone.

The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns. When he mocked trans men in women’s sports, it landed during a moment of peak absurdity, when the subject was everywhere and ripe for satire. It was easy. It was funny. But it was never a statement of allegiance.

"The Unstoppable..." makes that clear. The jacket, the Johnson parable, the Saudi sermon, the relentless racial framing — all of it points in the same direction.

Comedy, at its best, unsettles everyone. It exposes what our certainties conceal. In this special, Chappelle appears more interested in confirming his own.

Unstoppable, perhaps. But no longer subversive.