As we gear up (heh heh) for the first new Mad Max film in almost 30 years, let’s consider the lasting influence of the original trilogy. Just one look at the awesomely extensive list of parodies and homages to 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior easily confirms its status as an action classic, but the series’ most enduring legacy is absolutely the punk postapocalypse vision of the future created through the three films’ design and costuming. Sure, sci-fi costume and design was influenced by both fashion trends of the time and literary source material increasingly fascinated with grim, dilapidated, techno-dystopias.

Kimberly Smart, as Madame Nesle de la Tourelle, had her nipples cast for prosthetics for the swan nipple rings. After all the wool clothing and drab fashions of 1743 Scotland, Claire’s world in Outlander becomes far more colorful once she goes to France. And the women in the French court are more forward-thinking in ways she couldn’t have imagined, especially when it comes to beauty’s sometimes-shocking accoutrements — from genital waxing to nipple piercing.

Timothée Chalamet in The King and Laurence Olivier in Henry V. Frustrated writers in search of more confidence would do well to study the example of Joel Edgerton and David Michôd. For their Henry V film The King, currently streaming on Netflix, the pair borrowed most of the plot, characters, and big moments from Shakespeare’s trio of plays about the monarch, but chose to jettison the Bard’s famous verse in favor of dialogue of their own creation.

Willow Smith, perhaps cognizant of the mega-saturation of fun youth-pop in the exact vein of her three extant tracks (2010’s “Whip My Hair” and 2011’s “21st Century Girl” and Nicki Minaj-featuring “Fireball”), has entered 2012 with a major changeup. Sporting a video shot on the High Line and in Washington Square Park, “I Am Me” is an intense motivational ballad about being a little wacky and loving it (“I’m me, I’m freaky free-eee[?

Insecure Better-Like Season 3 Episode 1 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Insecure Better-Like Season 3 Episode 1 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » The season 3 premiere of HBO’s Insecure opens with Issa writhing and screaming beneath a sweating, thrusting Daniel, the ex-boyfriend/plaything introduced last season.

Faith Erin Hicks. The comics medium has been undergoing a revolution in the past decade, and Faith Erin Hicks is in the vanguard. Superhero fiction has long been the dominant mode for sequential art, but in recent years, female-led literature targeted at younger readers has been experiencing a spectacular rise in both visibility and sales. The past few years have seen sensational releases from youth-oriented creators like Raina Telgemeier (Ghosts), Hope Larson (Compass South), and Hicks, a Vancouver-based writer-artist with an animation background and a crackerjack eye for action and emotion.

Finn Jones. Few Marvel products have entered the world with more trepidation from viewers than Iron Fist. The Netflix series, which premieres Friday, follows the adventures of Danny Rand, a rich kid who trains in mystical martial arts in the Far East and returns to New York to fight evil. Though the character has been white since his comics debut in the early 1970s, Marvel faced pressure to cast an Asian-American actor and eschew the racial trope of a white man becoming the greatest champion of martial arts.

Jeremy Strong and his director James Gray took risks and made a mess to find Armageddon Time. Bilge Ebiri is a film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Criterion Collection, among others. “You’re fighting the tide of a ferocious anti-craft movement,” James Gray explains in a conversation with Jeremy Strong.

In the new Netflix movie Bird Box, Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, and Lil Rel Howery star as a group of survivors in a pretty odd end-of-the-world scenario. Demonic creatures have overrun the landscape, and if you look at them your greatest fears will manifest right before your eyes, which leads people who see the creatures to die by suicide. Throughout the film, Bullock and a pair of children who are only referred to as Boy and Girl must navigate a forest blindfolded to avoid seeing the critters.

Left, Graduation’s cover. Right, Kanye West’s earlier promotional art.Courtesy of Takashi Murakami, Kanye West, and Roc-A-Fella Records The just-released cover for Kanye West’s Graduation shows Kanye’s trademark bruin, manga-ized, being launched out of some kind of floating university in the sky. As a statement of purpose, it’s a little confused and busy; what is Kanye saying, exactly? That’s he’s finally ready for the world? Surely that was true two blockbuster albums ago.