Nicole Kidman. One of the most exciting things about more female-directed major movies is the prospect of women going back to stories that have already been told by men and reframing them, subjecting them to the “female gaze.” Sofia Coppola has done that — probingly, powerfully — with her remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 The Beguiled. The narrative —adapted from a novel by Thomas Cullinan — is largely identical in both films.

After teaming with Anne Hathaway to ill effect in the unhappy chick flick Bride Wars, you might expect Kate Hudson to know better than to sign up for another romcom where she plays a woman on the verge of marriage locked in battle with her best female friend. And yet, we now have Something Borrowed, where Ginnifer Goodwin wonders if it’s okay for her to sleep with Hudson’s fiance (Colin Egglesfield) because, after all, she’s been in love with him this whole time, and Hudson gets everything anyway and that’s so unfair.

T.V. Carpio appears in the Bradley Cooper thriller Limitless coming out this week, but more intriguing, she plays Arachne in the ill-fated Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. We eagerly got on the phone with the actress and found out she was far more willing to talk about her sex scene with Cooper than the boondoggle she got snared in on Broadway. Press her as we did, we could not get her to concede that the production was in any way troubled: Spider-Man himself would be felled by her mighty powers of loyalty!

Bruce Springsteen fans have been on fire with a question over the past few days: What’s the real opening lyric to “Thunder Road”? It started on July 3, when the New York Times’ lead Trump scribe and political reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted a line from the Boss’s epic Born to Run opener while waiting to watch the return of Springsteen on Broadway. “A screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways,” she wrote, setting off days of argument among Springsteen fans over whether the final word was “sways” or “waves.

A new Gaucho song is out, there’s a mutiny going on in Russia, and the year is somehow not 1980. Time is a social construct, man. More than four decades after being feared forever lost owing to a studio technician error, Steely Dan’s “The Second Arrangement” has surfaced in high-fidelity glory. The Expanding Dan Substack reports that Roger Nichols, one of the band’s longtime engineers, made a rough mix of the track on a cassette tape during the 1979 recording sessions prior to its accidental erasure.

In his breakout role as Stranger Things teen heartthrob Steve Harrington, actor Joe Keery’s almost comically thick head of hair took on a life of its own, to the point that the series went out of its way to have Steve address the steps to achieving his extremely impressive, extremely ’80s swoop: Fabergé Organics shampoo and conditioner, four spritzes of Farrah Fawcett hairspray, a secret only you and your good friend Dustin know, etc.

When you’re 19 and you’ve lived through substance abuse, people like to tell you that you’re wise beyond your years. It’s something singer-songwriter Julien Baker gets a lot, especially after people hear her music, which is filled with the sort of pain you expect from someone well beyond her teen years. But Baker thinks everyone is wrong about her. She admits to “having to confront darkness” in her past, but she likes to think of herself as “eternally becoming.

Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless. Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless. Dream house or … nightmare? “It knows what scares you” was the tagline for 1982’s Poltergeist, a horror classic that doubled as a cautionary tale about the dark side of desirable suburban real estate.

Elf. This article has been updated to include new additions. Ah, Christmas — having fun with your family, spending some quiet time cozied up by the fireplace with a good book, and taking your hometown high-school crush to the local ice-skating rink. These are just some of the things we all know you won’t actually do. No, because you’re a sicko like the rest of us, you will be spending the holidays streaming movies and TV shows on the couch, slowly turning up the volume as your relatives get tipsier and tipsier.

Björkian. Another episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, another big challenge for the contestants to attempt, another teachable moment for Ru, and another shocking elimination — if season seven of RPDR has nothing else going for it, at least it’s consistent. “The DESPY Awards” (no, it doesn’t seem to stand for anything) feature paper gowns and meltdowns; who could ask for anything more? Here are the winners of the DESPY Awards’ moment of the night.