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    ‘Agnes’ Review: A Crisis of Faith, and Filmmaking

    In this plodding horror-drama from Mickey Reece, a possessed nun drives one of her sisters to leave their convent.The art house fascination with nuns is hardly new: Jacques Rivette’s vibrant drama “The Nun” made waves in the 1960s; Jeff Baena’s “The Little Hours” lampooned medieval Catholicism in 2017. Theaters have again opened their arms to nunsploitation this month with “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s latest shocker, and now “Agnes,” from the wildly prolific director Mickey Reece — it’s his 18th feature film to come out in the last 10 years.Unfortunately for Reece, quantity is no indicator of quality; this choppy film has little to say, particularly about cloistered women, despite being named after a possessed sister and dedicating a plotline to an ex-nun.Though “Agnes” opens during a Mass in the convent before introducing its titular character (Hayley McFarland) — a satanic sister who reveals her wickedness by cursing and levitating teacups — it quickly centers the religious men tasked with exorcising Agnes. Men like the jaded Father Donaghue (Ben Hall), who is soon to be relocated to some faraway country after being accused of child molestation. He warns Benjamin (Jake Horowitz), a priest-in-training just shy of taking his vows, against the lifestyle.The second act focuses on Agnes’s friend, Mary (Molly C. Quinn), after she leaves the convent. As she navigates normal life, she connects with Agnes’s former lover, a comedian named Paul Satchimo (Sean Gunn).If that all sounds confusing and pointless, that’s because it mostly is. There is a clear through line of faithlessness in the script by Reece and John Selvidge, but it is otherwise so aimless and underdeveloped as to turn this 93-minute film into a plodding slog. (If you’re expecting to learn anything substantial about Agnes herself, for instance, you won’t.) Couple that with erratic editing and endless horror clichés and you have a boring movie that, like its titular character, causes some bloodshed but for the most part does absolutely nothing at all.AgnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘The Unforgivable’ Review: Mirthless in Seattle

    Sandra Bullock plays a woman on parole in this Netflix film adaptation of a British mini-series.To forgive is divine. To forget is good enough in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Unforgivable,” a tortured drama that tracks a half-dozen Seattleites grappling with — or oblivious to — decades-long traumas caused by the killing of a cop during a fraught eviction. After being convicted of that crime, Ruth (Sandra Bullock), did 20 years in prison. Now paroled, she telegraphs her angst with sunken eyes and chapped lips; the film’s sickly yellow lighting does the same, as does Ruth’s night-shift factory gig decapitating salmon. But the dead officer’s sons (Will Pullen and Tom Guiry) don’t think that Ruth has repented enough — a judgment shared by the adoptive parents (Richard Thomas and Linda Emond) who raised Ruth’s orphaned baby sister, Katherine, to forget her older sibling. The adult Katherine (Aisling Franciosi) is haunted by memories of a mysterious brunette. (Katherine crashes her car the moment Ruth is released from prison, giving the film a mystical spritz that evaporates immediately.)This is a glum show of flashbacks scored by strings that keen as though Ruth’s conscience is rubbing a wet finger on a glass of water. The screenplay, adapted by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles from a British mini-series, gifts Bullock a few big screaming scenes but mostly has her slouching around silently while it dithers over whether or not to root for Ruth to rebuild her life. (Symbolically, she has a second job in construction.)On Team Ruth is Jon Bernthal as a chatterbox who woos the secretive felon. Against her is Viola Davis as a mother raising two boys in Ruth’s former home who argues that, as miserable as Ruth is, if it were her Black sons in the system, “they would be dead.” In a role scarcely more than a cameo, Davis cuts through the film’s fog.The UnforgivableRated R for faces damaged by fists, feet and bullets. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Last and First Men’ Review: Pondering Posterity

    Tilda Swinton narrates the bleak future of humanity in the only feature directed by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.“Last and First Men” is the only feature directed by the Icelandic film composer Johann Johannsson (“Sicario”), who died suddenly in 2018. According to the producer Thor Sigurjonsson in notes provided for journalists, his death occurred late in the filmmaking process, just before “we were about to start on the final music.”Yet even describing “Last and First Men” as a movie, while accurate, is misleading; it often feels closer to a literary exercise or fine-art photography. (A live, multimedia version was shown in 2017.) It combines a complex, “Dune”-like mythology with the sonorous, hypnotic line readings of the British essay films of Patrick Keiller (“Robinson in Ruins”).Based on the 1930 science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, the film mainly consists of 16-millimeter black-and-white images of abandoned monuments, identified in the credits as being in the Balkans. No humans appear. While the camera surveys the asymmetries of the monolithic sculptures, often pondering the sky through negative space in the stonework, Tilda Swinton delivers a voice-over that begins with an epic poem-style invocation (“listen patiently”) and is framed as a dispatch from two billion years from now, when our descendants, bracing for extinction, share a telepathic hive mind and have appearances that would look grotesque to us.The landscape, with the occasional sight of a bird or a cloud streak from an airplane, pierces the illusion that we’re observing the colonized Neptune that Swinton speaks of. Color — in the green of an oscilloscope or in the fiery hues of the sun — intermittently punctures the monochrome. And Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.Last and First MenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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    ‘Encounter’ Review: The Scenic Route

    A volatile veteran attempts to rescue his sons from a perceived alien threat in this confused cross between sci-fi thriller and family drama.At the beginning of “Encounter,” the sophomore feature from the British director Michael Pearce, something bright and blazing crash-lands in the night and a swarm of microorganisms appears to colonize an earthly host. This body-snatching setup could not be more familiar. It could also be a feint.Using the tropes of the alien-invasion thriller to tell another, more complicated story, Pearce and his co-writer, Joe Barton, make exactly half of a good movie. For a while, it’s enough to watch Malik (an electric Riz Ahmed), a stressed-out former Marine, interact with his two young sons (Aditya Geddada and Lucian-River Chauhan) as they drive full-tilt from Oregon to Nevada. Believing he is saving the boys from an extraterrestrial threat, Malik has kidnapped them from the home of his ex-wife and her new partner. His destination is a bunker where, he explains to the children, scientists are secretly working to repel the microbial invaders.To the boys, this is initially a welcome adventure; but as Malik’s behavior becomes more volatile and unnerving — and we learn more of his history — his sons grow anxious and the movie grows too fond of its ambiguities. Malik’s trauma is clear, his invisible wounds as evident as the parasites he sees crawling in the eye of a California state trooper. Yet, after setting up a potentially powerful study of damage and delusion, Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” signaled an unusual talent) remains torn between science fiction and psychological fact. And despite Benjamin Kracun’s sometimes haunting visuals — a decaying mining community in the Nevada desert; a drone shot of government vehicles gathering with insectoid purpose — the movie finally has nowhere to run but out of steam.EncounterRated R for men with guns and creepy-crawlies with agendas. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters and on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ Review: A Producer Who Found His Groove

    If you expect to learn much about Robert Stigwood, this new documentary about the famed manager (of the Bee Gees) and producer (of “Saturday Night Fever”) will leave you frustrated.Talk about bait and switch: Although it is nominally about the film and music mogul Robert Stigwood, the latest entry in HBO’s Music Box series has little new or insightful to say about him. There’s nothing about his childhood as a gay kid in 1950s Australia, and only perfunctory mentions of his managing Eric Clapton, or producing the original Broadway stagings of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita.”His association with the Bee Gees earns more attention but that’s because they were an integral part of “Saturday Night Fever” — the focus of much of “Mr. Saturday Night” and arguably Stigwood’s greatest achievement as a producer. (The new documentary works best as an addendum to the Frank Marshall film “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”)Most of the time, the director John Maggio covers familiar territory: a quick primer on disco, Stigwood optioning the writer Nik Cohn’s article about the nightlife scene in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, and how John Travolta found his groove, with help from the dance coach Deney Terrio.But even in what it does cover, the doc feels rushed and skimpy, relying mostly on testimonies from former executives of the entrepreneur’s company while the stars he worked with remain conspicuously absent.Stigwood also scored with the movie “Grease,” and then it was all over: He got caught in the disco backlash, lost his golden touch. Maggio ends his story in the early 1980s, even though Stigwood lived until 2016. He is thinking small about a man who used to dream big.Mr. Saturday NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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    The Oscars Are Broken. Here’s How to Fix Them.

    The ratings flop that was the last ceremony provided useful lessons in what not to do. But there are steps the academy can take for an actually enjoyable evening.His client was having a great night. He should have been thrilled. But on the last Sunday night in April, as this year’s dire Oscar ceremony continued to deflate, a top Hollywood representative texted me about the “beyond terrible” show and fretted, “The entire country has tuned out.”Later, as the ceremony entered an even worse final act that included a flop-sweat comedy bit and a bungled best-actor reveal, I got another text from him: “This could kill the Oscars. It’s that bad.”Reviews of the show proved nearly as scathing, and the ratings released the next day were grim: The Oscars had plunged more than 50 percent from the previous year, drawing just under 10 million people, the lowest number on record since those figures had been tabulated.I’ve thought about that ratings drop (and those doom-laden texts) quite a bit in the months since, as a new awards season has begun. There is a lot of excitement in Hollywood right now, as premieres and award shows can be held in person again and the movies vying for awards feel much bigger. But behind people’s unmasked smiles, I detect some anxiety, as though there’s a question that everybody is still too nervous to pose: What if all of this is leading up to an Oscars that nobody will watch?I think it helps that the show has returned to a guaranteed 10 best-picture nominees, which should ensure that a broader cross-section of movies gets nominated, just as the academy’s laudable drives to diversify its membership ought to result in a slate of nominees that feels less out of touch. But all of those efforts could seem fruitless if the show’s audience shrinks so starkly once again. After the last ceremony tanked the Oscars’ reputation and ratings, here are four things the academy should do to fix things before next year’s show.Hire a host.The last three Oscar ceremonies have gone without an M.C., which continues to feel like a missed opportunity. The right host can help drive viewers to the show and provide memorable, viral moments: Part of the reason the Golden Globes used to gain on the Oscars is that they could promote buzzy hosts like Ricky Gervais and the ace duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.Hosting the Academy Awards used to be one of Hollywood’s most prestigious gigs, but the show often fumbled that privilege over the last decade: There was the James Franco-Anne Hathaway debacle (which might have worked with sharper writing and a more engaged partner for Hathaway), smarmy turns from Seth MacFarlane and Neil Patrick Harris, and two back-to-back stints from a disinterested Jimmy Kimmel. Ever since 2018, when Kevin Hart stepped down from the show after refusing to apologize for anti-gay jokes, the ceremony has decided to dispense with a host altogether.But if the Oscars are so eager to cram blockbuster content into a show that often celebrates small indie movies, why not invite some hosts from that tentpole realm? I’d rather watch Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt host the Oscars than star in something like “Jungle Cruise,” and it’s fun to imagine what a quick-witted Marvel duo like Paul Rudd and Simu Liu could do, too. I fear the Oscars might never restore the host position now that the show runs shorter without one. But on that note …Understand that shorter doesn’t mean better.In their never-ending quest to trim the Oscars to a manageable length, ABC and the academy would do well to remember one thing: It’s not about how much time the show takes, it’s about how well the show uses that time. Why not lean into the Oscars’ mammoth reputation and fill every nook and cranny with something exciting? It still boggles my mind that there isn’t a slate of movie trailers on par with the Super Bowl: Imagine how many people would tune in if the commercial breaks promised a first look at the “Black Panther” sequel, just for starters.When the show is pared down too ruthlessly, it leaves less room for the real human moments that we tune in for. Those moments don’t have to come solely from the acceptance speeches, either: I often think fondly of the 2009 show, hosted by Hugh Jackman, which made room for five former winners to present each of the acting categories. It was a lovely way to pay homage to Oscar history, and all the nominees were memorably moved by the tribute. That ceremony ran about 11 minutes longer than the one that aired this past April, but I’ll take those 11 minutes over nearly anything the shorter show had to offer.Restore the clips and performances.One of the reasons this year’s Oscar show felt so deadly dull is that nearly all the movie clips were excised from the broadcast. For casual viewers who tune into the Oscars without seeing most of the nominees, those clips create a rooting interest: Based on the glimpses of performances and craft, you can make your own armchair guess of who’ll win. And when I watched the show as a child, the movie clips offered a sneak preview of worlds, lives and people previously unknown to me. They’re essential.This year’s ceremony also punted the best-song performances to the preshow, which deprived the main event of several high-energy moments. (Can you imagine if that scorching “Shallow” duet from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper had been booted to the preshow two years ago?) With original songs in the mix this year from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish, the Oscars would be foolish not to milk those performances for everything they’re worth. And if all those clips and performances make the show run too long, just cut the shorts already!Make peace with the Oscars’ new reality.With all that said, there’s only so much the Oscars can do to halt their linear-ratings slide. People simply consume media differently these days, and many households and younger audiences have cut the cord entirely, consuming all of their TV shows on streaming services.But the essential pull of the Oscars still remains. It’s the only awards show that generates this much chatter, and the narratives that unspool because of the show — from boundary-shattering victories like the best-picture winner “Parasite” to a cultural movement like #OscarsSoWhite — continue to ripple outward through our culture. I saw it last year, when the “Minari” star Steven Yeun became the first Asian American nominated for best actor, and when the “Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to win best director: Even though their films were hardly blockbusters, their achievements went incredibly viral on social media.That sort of engagement proves that there’s still a massive audience out there, albeit one that tunes in ever more frequently via Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. If the academy wants to lure all of those eyeballs to the actual broadcast, then it should make a more compelling play for their attention. Despite recent missteps, people haven’t lost interest in the idea of the Oscars. It’s the show itself that’s in need of a tuneup. More

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    ‘Fatal Distraction’ Review: Parents Go Through the Unthinkable

    In the documentary by Susan Morgan Cooper, a father is on trial after his baby dies in the back seat of a hot car.On the morning of June 18, 2014, Justin Ross Harris and his wife, Leanna, were the adoring parents of a 22-month-old son, Cooper. By the end of the day, their child was dead. Harris forgot to drop off his son at day care, and instead drove to work, leaving Cooper in the back seat, where the child died in the Georgia heat.This year, 23 children have died in hot cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The documentary “Fatal Distraction” uses the tragic example of the Harris family to demonstrate this phenomenon. By following Harris’s murder trial in 2016, it shows the worst case scenario of what can happen when a child is left unattended.The director Susan Morgan Cooper (“To the Moon and Back”; “An Unlikely Weapon”) takes the title of her film from a 2009 article written by Gene Weingarten, who appears in the documentary, along with a number of experts who have studied the issue of hot car deaths. In talking head interviews that unfortunately establish the film’s rote, even indifferent visual style, specialists offer dispassionate explanations for how parents can forget their children.More powerful sequences involve statements from experts of a different kind — the agonized parents of children who died in the back seat. Cooper’s mother, Leanna, is interviewed for the movie, and her recollections of her son’s death and her ex-husband’s trial are among the movie’s most damning testimonies against the common practice of criminalizing caregivers who leave their children behind.If the film is at times unimaginative as a work of art, it succeeds as a humane resource for understanding an unthinkable scenario.Fatal DistractionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

    Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More