Have you heard? The movies are dead. Or they are dying. Depends on who you ask. And it is true: It’s been a rough summer at the box office so far. But when every new bit of news seems to portend doom for this most beloved pastime, there’s still reason not to be a complete pessimist about the future of moviegoing.

While it’s not technically summer yet — that will happen on June 20 — summer movie season typically gets underway the first weekend in May. In recent years, the honor of kicking things off has gone to a superhero tentpole, with the pandemic era of 2020 and 2021 being a notable exception to the rule. This year, however, the movie that was slotted in that spot was The Fall Guy, the well-reviewed action rom-com featuring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman. It did not have the same impact as a Guardians of the Galaxy, which had its third installment in 2023, or an Avengers, which dominated in 2019, bringing in only $28.5 million on its opening weekend against a $140 million budget. Other disappointments kept coming, including the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa, which led what was deemed by Variety “the worst Memorial Day weekend in nearly three decades.”

But there are some signs of life: Bad Boys: Ride or Die beat expectations, and hopes are high for both Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. So should we be mourning the moviegoing experience? Or is there hope yet? Here’s an optimistic take on our dire situation. 

The strikes were always going to make this a bummer of a year 

Remember last summer? While you were dressing up in your finest pink and going to see Barbie, Hollywood was in the midst of one of the most massive labor movements in its history. The Writers Guild of America went on strike in May followed by the Screen Actors Guild in July. While some smaller projects continued shooting through interim agreements with SAG, it meant that for the most part production on big-budget features ground to a halt. The strikes meant that 2024 was always going to be a tough year for the movie business. 

As the Hollywood Reporter notes, Deadpool was supposed to take the spot of The Fall Guy, but had to be delayed to July because of the work stoppage. Say what you will about Deadpool and the aggressively self-referential nature of that franchise, which can be very grating, but we’d likely be having a very different conversation if that movie had already debuted. Meanwhile, other films that could have made waves were either pushed to the fall (Mufasa: The Lion King) or bumped to 2025 (Marvel’s Thunderbolts). The strike delays were no help for an already battered industry coming off of the pandemic — even though the strikes themselves were a net good for workers. Still, it is impossible to evaluate this box office like any other. 

Furiosa bombing sucks — but it shouldn’t be the barometer

Let’s get this straight: Furiosa bombing sucks. Yes, it’s based on preexisting intellectual property, but it’s a brilliant movie from one of the all-time great directors, George Miller. So why did it feel like a bad fit for box office supremacy? For one, it’s time to look at Fury Road as an anomaly. When that film opened in 2015, it exceeded expectations for a new entry in a decades-old franchise featuring entirely new cast members in part because it was just such an undeniable masterpiece. On top of that, it still placed second in its opening weekend box office to Pitch Perfect 2. (Alas, the box office was generally a lot healthier then, meaning both raked in a lot more coin than Furiosa or its competitor Garfield.)

Despite Fury Road’s Oscar nominations and classic status, it makes sense that audiences would not rush to see a prequel, especially one that was not as rapturously received as its predecessor. It probably didn’t help that Anya Taylor-Joy replaced Charlize Theron, even if Taylor-Joy is fabulous in her own right. And, on top of all of that, as my colleague Bilge Ebiri wrote in Vulture, a movie as gloriously strange as Furiosa was never supposed to be the kind of thing that rescued cinemas. Thus, while sad that audiences didn’t flock to it, it’s hard to read as a death knell in and of itself. 

Flops keep on trucking

Remember when I said The Fall Guy flopped? Well, it did, but it also continued to make money at the box office even once Universal dropped it on digital, and has now made over $165 million worldwide. Meanwhile, John Krasinski’s kids film IF has also continued to make money despite its noxiously bad reviews and not-so-great initial haul. It’s all a reminder that opening weekend is important, but it’s not the be-all and end-all in some cases. Just look at the success of Anyone But You, the rom-com that opened mildly in December and then kept building on word of mouth to the extent that it got a Valentine’s Day rerelease and made over $200 million globally. 

We’re only a year out from Barbie and Oppenheimer 

Look, I personally find it hard to get too bummed out when I remember that last summer we had the high of Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both films far exceeded box office expectations, grossing over $1 billion worldwide. Collectively they eventized going to the cinemas again. People dressed up for Barbie, and flocked to IMAX 70MM for Oppenheimer. I don’t expect executives to immediately take the right lessons from this win — green lighting inspired non-sequels from genius creators — but I refuse to believe that was all for naught. 

There’s hope on the horizon, especially when you don’t underestimate audiences

The fourth Bad Boys movie has been heralded as a box office savior thanks to its $56 million opening weekend, and that is thrilling, but anyone is surprised by its popularity was underestimating Black and Latino audiences, who propelled it to success. Meanwhile, Inside Out 2, opening this weekend, is set to serve another group of people who need entertainment: children. Quality kids movies are few and far between — sorry, Garfield — and with school nearly out it should draw the little ones to air-conditioned seats. (Last year, Matt Singer wrote a great piece bemoaning just how sparse the kiddie market has been of late.) 

And finally there’s Deadpool & Wolverine. In some ways, it will be something of a philosophical bummer if the Deadpool sequel is a huge success. Why? Well, it will prove that superhero IP still has juice and probably condemn us to another 10 years of guys in suits. On the other hand, I will still cheer if it brings in the enormous haul everyone expects. A win’s a win. 

For a long while, it seemed as though the Broadway-to-Hollywood pipeline, with a few exceptions, flowed one way. A musical would debut on the stage and then eventually make its way to film. It’s what happened with the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics of the mid-century like Carousel and South Pacific and eventually Best Picture winner The Sound of Music. My Fair Lady ditched Julie Andrews for Audrey Hepburn and won the Oscar in 1965. Bob Fosse reimagined Cabaret for the cinema in 1972, and his version with Liza Minnelli became in many ways the definitive interpretation of Kander and Ebb’s show, also winning the Academy Award.

But the movie musical waned in popularity and the pipeline started flowing in the other direction. Broadway became overloaded with musicals based on movies: Legally Blonde and Groundhog Day, Grey Gardens and Mrs. Doubtfire, Kinky Boots and The Full Monty. It almost felt like an epidemic for theater fans. Regardless of the quality — and they varied widely in quality — the musicals based on movies had the sheen of desperation. Please come to the theater, they seemed to shout, it’s just like that thing you like but with songs.

And thus begets another phenomenon: the movie musical based on a musical based on a movie. It happened with Mel Brooks’s 1967 The Producers, which was turned into a beloved Tony-winning musical and then a panned 2005 movie musical. Now, however, we have gotten two of these in rapid succession: The Color Purple, which hit theaters on Christmas, and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, which debuts on January 12. Confusingly, both of these films are titled the same as their cinematic predecessors, but make no mistake, they are packed with singing and dancing. 

On paper, The Color Purple and Mean Girls couldn’t be more different, regardless of their Broadway roots. One, based on the Alice Walker novel, is the story of Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor in the 2024 film), a Black woman at the turn of the 20th century in Georgia who suffers abuse at the hands of her father and husband, but over decades comes into her own. The other is about a nasty clique at a high school in Illinois. (Do I really need to explain the plot of Mean Girls to you?) But coming out so close together, they show the limits of transferring stories between mediums. 

Stripping The Color Purple down and building it back up

You can make the argument that the musical version of The Color Purple — with a book by Marsha Norman and songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray — is less an adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie version than an adaptation of the original text by Walker, but that’s something of a stretch as they are deeply indebted to one another. 

There was a direct throughline between the first film and the show. The Broadway production was produced by Quincy Jones, who produced and scored the Spielberg iteration, and Oprah Winfrey, who starred in the original film as Sofia, now played by Danielle Brooks. Now, Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment produces the movie musical along with Winfrey and Jones. Winfrey explained at the premiere that the latest incarnation only went ahead with Spielberg’s blessing: “This film couldn’t have happened without the original, and couldn’t have happened without Steven Spielberg allowing it to happen.”

Indeed, in reviewing the first Broadway production, the New York Times’s Ben Brantley wrote that it “does bring to mind the enjoyably hokey cinematic ravishments of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film version.” 

I never saw that production, which was met with tepid response, but I did see the acclaimed one that followed in 2015, which toned down the spectacle for a stripped-down aesthetic that relied largely on a towering performance from Cynthia Erivo as Celie. The nearly bare stage allowed Erivo’s raw emotion and astounding voice to fill the room. With few other distractions, you could focus on how she transformed herself as Celie’s understanding of herself developed. 

For the screen, director Blitz Bazawule goes in the opposite direction. Instead of taking cues from the small scale of the Erivo version, Bazawule, whose credits include Beyoncé’s Black Is King, goes all out for what almost amounts to a brightly colored musical extravaganza. Nearly every song is accompanied by a chorus of dancers in exuberant costumes doing elaborate choreography. 

Some of these choices work better than others. The opening sequence “Mysterious Ways” is a blast of joyous gospel energy. The riotous juke joint performance by torch singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) is galvanizing. However, I was frustrated to find that “What About Love?” — Celie’s love ballad with Shug — takes place in the world of a vintage movie musical. Specifically, according to a recent story in the New York Times, Stormy Weather starring Lena Horne from 1943. It’s sumptuous, but you can argue it also does a disservice to the love story the song is telling. It made their romantic connection somehow feel less tangible, more the stuff of fantasy.

But that’s the ultimate pitfall of taking things from the stage to the screen. On the stage, the heightened experience of watching someone belt with all their might can enhance a story’s power. Hearing the sounds of voices live can be shatteringly effective. You can hear the pain or elation in the vibrato. On screen, if staged ineffectively, the singing can make the moments feel somehow less true. It’s unnatural for people to break into song and you have to find the right balance to make it feel transcendent. This is why the likes of Cabaret and 2002’s Chicago remove the songs from the diegetic action of the movie, instead letting them live in a sort of theatrical limbo. 

The movie-to-musical-to-movie-musical path makes achieving that extra difficult. We’ve seen successful versions of both: How do you meld them together? 

A re-creation with songs? Or something entirely new? 

While there is some evocation of Spielberg’s 1985 film in The Color Purple, it’s indisputable that Bazawule is trying to honor what it means to be a big-screen musical in his ambitious if at times overwrought staging. Not that the trailer advertised that. 

The trailers for both The Color Purple and Mean Girls hide the fact that they are musicals. The only clue you would have that something is up with Mean Girls is a musical note in the logo. But, make no mistake, Mean Girls is a musical. So much so that I think some audiences are going to be shocked when it opens with outcasts Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), framed in a smartphone screen, singing about what’s to come. 

Mean Girls was met on Broadway with a solid if not overwhelming reception, with critics largely highlighting the humor over the songs from composer Jeff Richmond (Fey’s husband) and lyricist Nell Benjamin. The stage production updated some of the material but for the most part wanted to hit the same beats to appease the audience. 

Would that mean, in movie form, the musical would just read as an unnecessary remake of the still-beloved original? The trailer made it seem that way. Weirdly, though, the musical numbers bloom on screen in this version directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr in a way they couldn’t on stage. In the original production, which I saw, Mean Girls: The Musical sometimes felt like a bootleg, cobbled-together version of the 2004 film. So why is that? 

To again say something extremely obvious, unlike The Color Purple, no version of Mean Girls has hewed that close to reality, what with the original’s fantasy sequences of teens acting like animals in the mall as if it were their watering hole. The silliness allows the directors to take more goofy risks with the musical sequences, and it makes sense that these songs would exist in the minds of these hormonal, scheming kids. 

Yes, Mean Girls has some points to make about high school, but it’s all in service of the jokes, which means the movie musical format actually fits it shockingly well. On stage, you can’t land a visual gag the way you can in a movie, which means, if there was ever going to be a Mean Girls musical, perhaps the screen was the best option. Sure, there are some added jokes, but the musical aspect is what makes it feel fresh and what gives the great new cast something to make their own.

And yet the transferring of the material still feels a little, well, exhausting. After all, Fey’s 30 Rock once had a joke about a character winning best actress “in a movie based on a musical based on a movie.” It’s a mouthful just saying it.

Earlier this year a TikToker posted a video explaining how she and her husband “prepared” themselves for the sex scenes in Oppenheimer featuring Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh. The influencer described how her husband would close his eyes every time there was nudity or intercourse onscreen and she would tell him when it was over. “It literally, I will tell you what right now, took nothing away from the story,” she says to the camera. 

An account on X posted the video with the comment, “this actually makes me feel like i’m losing my mind.” But this one clip also felt indicative of a larger trend: a growing resistance to the notion of sex in film. For the past year, it has felt like every couple of months someone tweets (or whatever we want to call that action now) a declaration that sex scenes are Bad and Unnecessary. This is followed usually by a round of people dunking on said tweet until it quiets down enough for someone else to have the same thought, and thus the cycle continues. But it’s not just anecdotal. There is actually data to back up the sensation that Gen Z is resistant to seeing sex depicted. A study from UCLA recently revealed that 47.5 percent of 13- to 24-year-olds surveyed said they didn’t think sex was necessary in movies and TV shows. 

God forbid any of these people see Poor Things: the new film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, which stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman made anew from the dead body of a suicide victim and the brain of her unborn child. As Bella’s mind develops so does her libido, which is unearthed after she gleefully happens upon masturbation leading her down her adventure of sexual discovery. Her understanding of her own mind and the world around her corresponds with her experimentations in pleasure. 

But this isn’t the only film that has used sex in crucial ways this year. In fact, with Poor Things leading the charge, this has been one of the best years in recent memory for meaningful sex scenes that are revelatory and relevant, as well as sensual. These movies all act as a counter to the notion that you can or should just close your eyes if two people are getting it on during the plot. 

Why the sex in Poor Things is so good

In Poor Things sex is everything. It is often very funny, but more importantly, it’s the way in which Bella becomes a full person rather than simply a creation. The film, based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the late Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, opens in black and white as Bella, newly brought to life, is living in the home of surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). 

Godwin, called God, is possessive of Bella as he means to study her, but also kindly, in a way, toward her. Yet as soon as she figures out how to make herself orgasm she develops a power he cannot control. Stimulating herself with an apple she realizes she can make herself “happy when want.” Sex is immediately framed as a path to joy. Godwin himself has been experimented on by his late father, and his flesh is a prison for him. He cannot eat without being hooked up to a machine that turns his gaseous eruptions into bubbles. As soon as Bella becomes a sexual being, however, she is free.

She runs off with a toff of a lawyer, the hilariously named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who promises to show her the world and indulge her impulses. But it turns out her voracity for sex — a routine she calls “furious jumping” — is even too much for this ladies’ man. Stone performs these lustful scenes with Ruffalo with a deliriously amusing looseness. We can almost see Bella’s new brain churning as she bounces on top of Duncan: She’s thrilling herself, but she’s also calculating her likes and dislikes.

But, sex, like everything, is not all euphoria. She realizes Duncan cannot satisfy her needs, and he, in turn, becomes jealous and controlling, forcing her aboard a ship where she cannot escape him. After learning onboard about both philosophy and poverty, she gives Duncan’s gambling winnings away and gets them kicked off the ship.

Marooned in Paris, she decides to earn her living through sex work and is quick to discover the strange and depressing side of carnality. And yet Bella is never fully disillusioned. It’s all an experiment for her. Sex is capital, and she’s learning about capitalism, socialism, and her intellectual wants. 

When she finally returns to God, she is not ashamed of her sex work, and perhaps less insatiably horny but still proud of her needs. In the climactic moment, she faces off against the man who was her body’s husband in her former life (Christopher Abbott), a violent military general who wishes to remove her clitoris so she will become docile. She refuses and gives him a goat brain, becoming the mad scientist herself. 

Poor Things is about a person who, initially, has a physical form and brain that are alien to one another. Sex allows her mind and body to meet. It’s through sex that she can understand the peculiarity of her species, and herself as well.  

2023 in (other) sex scenes

In Poor Things, sex is an act of searching for self. In other films this year, it can be an act of pure connection, or an act of manipulation, or an act shot through with horror or foreboding. The indie Passages, directed by Ira Sachs and released over the summer, uses sex as a tool of its messy protagonist, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a gay man with a husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), who begins an affair with a female schoolteacher, Agathe (Adéle Exarchopoulos).

Tomas is a person who acts totally on impulse, and when he sleeps with Agathe for the first time, it’s invigorating in a way he didn’t expect. Agathe, meanwhile, is entranced by him — someone who is so at home in his skin, and his cute little crop tops, that he wields it like power over other people, including Martin, who, despite his anger, continues to be drawn into Tomas’s orbit. Sex in Passages is both exciting and dangerous for these people, and necessary to understand how someone like Tomas — so reckless in the way in which he toys with others’ emotions — holds such sway over their lives. 

On the contrary, the sex in All of Us Strangers, the new film from Andrew Haigh, is overtly tender even at its most explicit. Andrew Scott plays Adam, a writer who starts up a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), another lonely man in his London tower flat. All the while Adam is experiencing a ghostly occurrence: When he returns to his childhood home for research he finds his parents, who died in a car crash in the 1980s, living as if no time has passed. With his parents, he must confront the closeted part of himself; with his new lover, he is liberated. Even as All of Us Strangers deals with the transcendental, the sex is rooted in the corporeal with all of its exchange of fluids. It feels real to us because it feels real to Adam. That’s what matters. 

Sex this year has been absurd and nightmarish, getting at the particularly carnal fears, threats, and humiliations that make up human life: Like the moment between Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey in Beau Is Afraid or any number of scenes in Emerald Fennell’s often ridiculous Saltburn, including the period oral sex that indicates the bloodlust of Barry Keoghan’s striver protagonist. It has also been used to try to illuminate the personal lives of various historical figures. In Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Phoenix’s inept thrusting represents his insecurity. Or there’s Oppenheimer. 

The TikToker who went is an anti-porn, which she calls “corn,” activist, but regardless of that context, her idea that the sex is totally irrelevant to the rest of the film is crazy-making from a critic’s perspective. Of course, there is a point to the sex scenes in Oppenheimer. Director Christopher Nolan uses them to show his protagonist’s hubris, hubris that will lead to the creation of a weapon that haunts society. J. Robert Oppenheimer is in the middle of his tryst with psychiatrist Jean Tatlock when he recites the words from the Bhagavad Gita that will become his grim catchphrase: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Tatlock will eventually become canon fodder in his ascendancy toward greatness. 

In all of these movies — absolutely including Oppenheimer — the sex feels earned. It might be over the top (as it is in Poor Things) but it is utterly crucial to understanding how people move in their environments. It is completely and utterly human, a way of unpacking how these characters treat others and themselves. To remove it would be to exorcise some of the soul of these films. Look away if you dare.

Poor Things is playing in theaters now.

This has been a banner year for movies about Great Men. 

Now first let me clarify what I mean by the term Great Men. I don’t mean “men who are good,” for instance. This is not a moral judgment. Great Men can be bad men as well — bad for society, bad to their loved ones, etc. I mean, rather, movies about towering male figures whose names convey a certain amount of awe. Men like father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, composer Leonard Bernstein, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and carmaker Enzo Ferrari. These are men who have made an impact on the world, sometimes for ill. They are men history has deemed worthy of studying and that filmmakers with big budgets behind them have deemed worthy of exploring.

But the Great Man movie presents an interesting challenge: The directors don’t need to prove that their subjects are interesting — decades of media coverage have done that — they need to prove why they can tell their stories in an engaging way that doesn’t feel like a Wikipedia entry and actually captures the essential mystique of these guys. 

With Oppenheimer, Maestro, Napoleon, and Ferrari, Christopher Nolan, Bradley Cooper, Ridley Scott, and Michael Mann, respectively, have all seemingly taken on a challenge to reinvent the biopic formula as they pursue their passion projects about these icons. While their films differ in tone and execution, they’ve all attempted in similar ways to subvert typical biopic conventions. 

Getting inside their heads

With Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan makes his intentions plain on the first page of his screenplay. “Peer into my soul,” he writes. “J. Robert Oppenheimer, aged fifty, close-cropped greying hair.” 

Nolan wrote his script for the blockbuster film in the first person, essentially taking on the persona of the man behind the invention of the most destructive weapon the world has ever seen. You can see this as an act of hubris on the part of the director, but it is also a mission statement: Nolan wants to crack open Oppenheimer’s brain. His goal is not just to unpack his brilliance but also the guilt that arises after the US government takes his discovery and uses it to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

With his understanding of theoretical physics, Oppenheimer can envision the cosmos. Nolan uses those visions as both a demonstration of his intelligence and his capacity for harm. What at first seem like interludes to demonstrate Oppenheimer’s scientific imagination — shots of contextless explosions — morph into the horrors that plague his mind once the bomb has been deployed. Nolan uses Oppenheimer’s own tools to explain him, and to a certain extent, so do Cooper, Scott, and Mann. 

As Cooper tackles Leonard Bernstein in Maestro — both as director and in the lead role — he tries to use Bernstein’s music as a way into his psyche. Cooper consciously stays away from trying to expressly articulate what made Bernstein a great composer and conductor, a choice that can be frustrating for viewers who want a simple timeline of his highs and lows. Instead, he offers musical sequences that seek to capture the chaos of living as Bernstein, a man of effusive love, who was also semi-closeted, seeking relationships with men outside his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The most successful of these moments are the dream dance, wherein Lenny and Felicia are drawn into a production of “Fancy Free,” the ballet Bernstein composed for Jerome Robbins, and the performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in the UK. The latter offers no magical realism, but Bernstein’s (and in turn Cooper’s) effort is magical. You can see the effect he has on people in that exertion and the way he throws himself into his work. 

For Michael Mann, the director of Ferrari, his hero is like his engines: powerful but sometimes almost mechanical in his ambition. The sound of these contraptions is what fuels Mann’s film, a hum of energy that is almost like a score, and Driver seems to match his performance to that rhythm. He barrels into scenes with the furor of his cars, which, it should be noted, are also death traps, a pertinent detail. Enzo is surrounded by death, specifically the death of his son Dino, who has passed before the movie begins. 

Speaking of death: War is the tool by which Ridley Scott illuminates Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix). It’s through the impeccably staged, if not particularly accurate, battle sequences we can see Napoleon’s cunning and insecurity. He’s an ingenious strategist who does not know when to stop, his self-aggrandizement taking precedence over everything else. 

Whether physics, music, cars, or war, the filmmakers try to use what makes these men so revered as a way of both idolizing and humanizing them. The audience may not relate to their genius, but they can understand it through what they produced. In turn, the hope is that we can also understand their torment. 

Accessing them by the women around them 

What is a Great Man without the women around him? All of these films try to define their Great Men by their key relationships, and, yet, this is where they most often falter. For as much as each of these (male) directors tries to put the wives and girlfriends of these guys on equal footing, they are still mostly hypnotized by the Great Man himself. 

It’s in Ferrari that this seems like the biggest stretch. Mann sets his film during a period of Enzo Ferrari’s life in 1957 where Enzo is pulled between his wife and business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz) and his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) with whom he has a young child. Enzo and Laura’s son has died, and Enzo is resistant to allowing Lina’s child to bear his name — a sign of guilt. Both these female characters fall into easy archetypes: Laura is fiery and persistently furious. She is wracked by grief and understandably angry at Enzo for his philandering. Lina, meanwhile, is a patient and calming force, almost a motherly figure both to Enzo and his illegitimate heir. They are each reduced to the proverbial angel and devil on his shoulders. 

This mistress-versus-wife paradigm is also present in Oppenheimer, which has slightly more success with the dynamic. Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) isn’t as developed a character as her real-life counterpart deserves — she led a fascinating life that gets short shrift in the movie — but her presence is nonetheless haunting. Tatlock is a physical representation of the way humans are collateral damage for Oppenheimer, as evidenced by her disturbing death likely by suicide but possibly by assassination over Communist ties and connection to Oppenheimer. (A gloved hand alludes to the latter, which remains just a theory.) Meanwhile, Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) serves as an example of the way the heartbreak of loving a person like him can harden someone. After they wed, she quickly falls into alcoholism but is loyal to the end, especially in her crucial testimony scene. Being in his presence has certainly taken a toll. 

The difficulty of being married to a Great Man is never more evident than in Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) in Napoleon. His love letters to her offer a sort of framework for the film, but that love is both suffocating and deficient. He punishes her when she cheats on him, and when she can’t bear him an heir he divorces her and takes away her title. 

Cooper, meanwhile, tries the hardest to put Bernstein’s spouse on equal footing, framing Maestro essentially as the complicated love story between Lenny and Felicia. Still, it is a love story about what it means to love a Great Man. Mulligan’s performance is a wonderful demonstration of a woman compartmentalizing her feelings. She wants to love Lenny and all of his facets — knowing about his bisexuality — but finds she is fighting to define herself as he strays. That in itself makes her a secondary figure in the narrative. For as much as Maestro is about Lenny and Felicia, Lenny is still the main draw and Felicia’s arc is partly about her knowing that. 

It’s the ultimate conundrum of all of these movies. As much as someone may try to subvert the myth of the Great Man, it is hard not to fall under his spell. All of these movies have their moments of virtuosity, some more than others, and when they are at their best they capture why the Great Man is so entrancing. 

There’s a moment in Oppenheimer that seems almost like something out of a superhero movie or an Indiana Jones flick. Standing in his office at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) puts on a hat and picks up a pipe, each item lingered on by director Christopher Nolan’s camera. Nolan films these actions from behind like Oppenheimer is assuming his armor as he emerges to lead the Manhattan Project, the WWII effort that will result in the development of the atomic bomb. His shoulders are broad. His silhouette is totemic. “A rock star is born,” costume designer Ellen Mirojnick explains. “There’s an elegance, an empowerment, and a strength about who that man has become as he walks out of his office in the totality of this outfit.” 

Oppenheimer the movie is clear that Oppenheimer, the man, is not actually a superhero or a rock star, even if he might at times think of himself as such. Nolan’s film recognizes that its protagonist is both deeply conflicted and the orchestrator of atrocity. At the same time, it also acknowledges that Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, was deeply stylish.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has been dominating the movie fashion conversation this summer with its hot pink ensembles, but for menswear enthusiasts Oppenheimer might actually be the sartorial event of the season. Vogue coined Oppenheimercore to note how the boxy tailoring of the physicist has been reflected on runways, while Twitter observers speculated that the film might unleash a new level of “hat guys.” 

For fashion writers Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, also known as Tom and Lorenzo, a Nolan production always means great suits. “Christopher Nolan is a director after our own hearts, because he makes sure his leading men all know the value of a good suit, from Batman Begins to Inception to Tenet,” Fitzgerald writes in an email. “When we think of those films, we can’t help but picture how great the men looked in them.” 

The fact that Oppenheimer looks so good is not irrelevant to the plot. Nolan depicts him as a ladies’ man — which he was — and as someone who can convene a cult of personality around him. People are drawn to him not just because of his brilliance but because of his general suaveness. Which is all to say, the striking image of Oppenheimer on screen is very much not incidental, according to Mirojnick. “It’s seductive in a way,” she says. “Because what you feel in the silhouette is that you feel the person. His silhouette embraced the body where it needed to be embraced.” 

Oppenheimer’s personal connection to the world of great tailoring is a matter of record. His father, Julius, worked in the world of menswear. According to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the biography on which Oppenheimer is based, Julius has a reputation as “one of the most knowledgeable ‘fabrics’ men in” New York. American Prometheus authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin wrote that Julius “dressed to fit the part, always adorned in a white high-collared shirt, a conservative tie, and a dark business suit.” 

In her initial research, Mirojnick was struck that over time Oppenheimer maintained a steady style, despite looking at images that spanned from the ’20s through the ’60s. He shifted his dress a little during his time at Los Alamos, she says, to adapt to the environment of the New Mexico desert — he loses the waistcoat, for instance — but that “silhouette” remains the same. (Mirojnick loves designing for a male “silhouette,” a fact she learned designing the costumes for Wall Street in 1987.)

Oppenheimer’s jacket might look a little large on his frame to the modern viewer, which gets skinnier as time passes; his tie might look a little short; his waistband might look a little high; and his hat might look a little big. (The style of the hat has been called “pork pie” but Mirojnick believes it’s a variation on that with a larger brim.) It’s all a bit “voluminous,” a word that Mirojnick uses, but that’s what makes it actually look “fashionable,” she adds. 

While some men might scoff at a bigger shoulder for fear of looking like Talking Heads-era David Byrne, a little length in that area actually looks good. “When you extend the shoulders like that you get a much more flattering proportion for the male figure because you’re able to build a kind of V-shaped silhouette for the suit,” says Derek Guy of the blog Die, Workwear! (Guy is probably best known as the Twitter menswear dude.) 

Mirojnick notes that she and Nolan weren’t too concerned with making the costumes of Oppenheimer look perfectly period accurate. “We were not one to keep it so strict, that it would take somebody out of the story,” she says. “I had to make it [so] a young audience would be as seduced as an older audience would be.” One key historical inaccuracy: Oppenheimer is one of the only characters to wear a hat. Normally during these eras, everyone would be donning headwear, but Nolan wanted Oppenheimer to stand out among his peers. 

It’s hard to tell how much the influence of Oppenheimer’s costuming will trickle down into everyday life; after all, the suit in general has been in decline. (Even Murphy didn’t wear one to every Oppenheimer event.) High fashion might take notice, however. Vogue’s Laia Garcia-Furtado argued: “My guess is the sartorial influence of this movie will be reflected in seasons to come.” Tom and Lorenzo believe that if the cyclical nature of trends accounts for anything, a ’40s revival is on the way. 

“With menswear, we went from a very Mad Men-inspired mid-’60s silhouette for men’s suits for the better part of a decade, then lockdown happened and after that we entered a period of funkiness and minor experimentation as the pants flared and a rainbow of color and print options became trendy again,” Fitzgerald explains. “If you go by the theory that fashion repeats itself, then we’re in roughly 1979 or so, which is right about the time that menswear went through a ’40s-inspired trend period.” 

So maybe a burst of Oppenheimer-inspired looks are on the horizon — at least when it comes to tailoring. It may even filter into women’s looks given how menswear has been a dominant trend for female celebrities this summer. (Tom and Lorenzo think the hat has taken too much of a beating from its “M’lady” associations to really weather a comeback.) 

For Mirojnick, there’s a thematic way in which the film reflects modern society. The horrors of today, after all, are very visible in the horrors of the past. “The world that they inhabit and the time periods that they inhabit are not dissimilar to the time periods we live in today,” she says. “So naturally fashion would imitate fashion or costumes would become fashion.” It’s also, as she said before, very seductive. In the context of the movie, that seduction is tinged with the evil Oppenheimer knows he has wrought. In the context of good clothes, that seduction is just, well, hot. 

Welcome to Noticed, Vox’s cultural trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.

What is it: Glorious pasta salads. But these are not your random aunt’s mayo-filled macaroni creations you remember from childhood barbeques. These are aesthetically pleasing bowls with interesting noodle shapes (heard of anellini?) and creative ingredients (halloumi, anyone?). They use fresh produce and Instagram-friendly oil brands, and they sometimes even require cooking rather than just haphazardly chopping items and throwing them together. The dressings? They are homemade. 

Where is it: The feeds of food influencers on Instagram and TikTok. On the latter platform, the hashtag #pastasaladsummer now has over 31 million views. Some of the prominent purveyors include food influencers @GrossyPelosi, @babytamago, and @cafehailee. Of course, there’s also an Alison Roman pasta salad, and the trend has even made its way to Good Morning America.  

Why you’re seeing it everywhere: Nostalgia mixed with aesthetics. It’s a classic summer gathering dish that can be remade into a colorful wonder with fresh ingredients and pantry staples. “Pasta salad’s the kind of perfect mix of a rebranding of a nostalgic thing,” content creator and cookbook author Dan Pelosi, also known as Grossy Pelosi, says.

Last year, TikToker Katie Zukhovich, a.k.a. the aforementioned @babytamago, was looking for a recipe to bring to a barbecue at her Italian American boyfriend’s house. She was always turned off by the idea of pasta salad drenched in bottled Italian dressings. “It kind of just seemed like a mishmash of vegetables, just like everything but the kitchen sink sort of thing,” she says. But then she had an idea: What if she loaded it up with stuff she loved (tomatoes, roasted red peppers, soppressata, mini mozzarella balls, arugula) and dressed it in a simple vinaigrette? She hashtagged a video of its creation with #pastasaladsummer on TikTok, adding ABBA’s “Chiquitita” as a soundtrack. It currently has 2.1 million views on the platform.

This year, she doubled down on pasta salad, anointing herself the “Pasta Salad Queen” with a dose of self-deprecation and kicking things off in April with a green version where orecchiette is nestled in with asparagus, marinated artichokes, olives, and more good green stuff including a pesto-type dressing. She has also made versions with ravioli, with fried capers, and with grilled peaches. And people are loving it. “I didn’t know there was such a cult following for pasta salad, to be honest,” Zukhovich says. “Because every time I post a video, I’ve never seen anything like it. People are like, ‘oh my god pasta salad pasta salad.’” Her pasta salads are even worth suffering for. Case in point, one person commented on the one featuring peaches, marinated tomatoes, and burrata: “As a member of the lactose sensitive community, I made this and am still recovering 4 days later but I would 10/10 do it again.” 

So why has pasta salad taken off? “It’s a really easy vehicle to be creative with, so I feel like that’s why creators and chefs like to make different versions of it,” Hailee Catalano, a.k.a. @cafehailee, tells me. “You really can put anything in it, honestly.” Catalano’s most recent  involves circular pasta known as anellini with chickpeas, sun-dried tomatoes, and feta, among other goodies. She likes the idea that the pasta’s hole could cradle the chickpea when you eat it. 

Most versions are not that hard to make — you chop, you whisk, maybe you do a bit of grilling or marinating — and they look nice, which, as Catalano adds, is good for internet engagement as well. There’s a satisfaction to watching all the disparate parts of the pasta salad come together in shortform video, ultimately resulting in a vibrant medley — no stop in the oven needed. Plus, pasta salad is just a good summer food. It tastes great cold right out of the fridge or even lukewarm after sitting out on a picnic table. It can be made ahead of time. In fact, Pelosi argues that “four days later is when your pasta salad peaks.” 

There is without a doubt a lot of innovation happening in the pasta salad space, but another reason that both Catalano and Zukhovich cite for its popularity is one that often drives online impulses: childhood memories — either good or bad. 

Pelosi, the author of the upcoming cookbook Let’s Eat, understands that deeply. Unlike the other creators I spoke to, Pelosi grew up with positive associations with pasta salad. In July 2020 he posted his family recipe, which, in his words, has “all the elements of an Italian sandwich” mixed up with tri-color rotini. Since then, he’s witnessed the virality of the dish grow. “I’m sort of like, get off my lawn, bitch, stop making pasta salad, but I mean the more pasta salad the better,” he says. 

Pelosi doesn’t scorn some of the classic elements of pasta salad the way he finds some others do. He’s fine with mayo, which Zukhovich has banned from her pasta salads, along with penne, which is a no-go as per her rules of Pasta Salad Summer. (To be clear: Pelosi praised Zukhovich’s pasta salads in our conversation. They just land on different sides of the mayo debate.) Pelosi also embraces a “pasta-heavy” pasta salad which he feels he has seen going by the wayside. “I think now people are doing things like adding lettuce or a lot of vegetables and sort of shifting the ratio to be like less pasta,” he says. Pelosi, meanwhile, recently revealed a “honey sesame” pasta salad, an ode to a New England chain Joe’s American Bar and Grill, a staple of his adolescence. 

Browse #pastasaladsummer and you’ll find all kinds of variations on the theme, many of them gourmet or “healthy,” but some of them old-fashioned and creamy. There are subsets of pasta salad as well, including a host of chicken caesar recipes and a mini-trend involving elote pasta salad. What’s evident is that people are going to continue to make pasta salad. Zukhovich is brainstorming one with couscous or orzo, while Pelosi has new combinations coming in his book. “There’s no end in sight for me and pasta salad,” he says.