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Photo: Columbia/TriStar, MGM, FilmDistrict, A24 Films and Universal Studios It seems like a good bet that the car movie will always be with us: This year has already given us The Fate of the Furious and Baby Driver , and we still haven’t entirely recovered from Mad Max: Fury Road. Of course, a “car movie” can mean many things — from a racing flick to a road movie to, well, a film that’s just set among cars in general. Regardless, we thought this might be a good time to take a step back and look at some of the best car movies over the years, and to do so in an all-encompassing, inclusive way. As a result, this list of movies is quite eclectic — it includes gearhead classics, cult standbys, noirs, modern blockbusters, art-house favorites, and even some genuine obscurities. Along the way, it became clear to us that a “car movie,” more than anything, is a film where a car plays a key role in the way a character interacts with the world — be it as a weapon, a tool, a dream, a setting, or a metaphor. Here are the 33 greatest car movies. (And as usual, we’ve stuck to one film per franchise, lest you wonder why there aren’t half a dozen Fast and Furious movies on this list.) The Car (1977) This is basically Jaws with a car, and it’s just as loony as that sounds. A black automobile, presumably from the depths of Hell, terrorizes a small town, and it’s local lawman James Brolin ’s job to stop it. Utterly ridiculous, at times laughably so. But that’s kind of its genius, too: Because this car does all sorts of things a car could never actually do, you never quite know what to expect. Directed by Elliot Silverstein, this cult horror flick was a late-show mainstay: Any kid switching channels late at night in the ’80s when those ominous “Dies Irae” chords came on knew he or she was in for something special. Drive (2011) This movie isn’t quite the masterpiece it was billed as at the time, but it is a fascinating blend of pop influences — the … [Read more...] about The 33 Greatest Car Movies Ever

Photo: Rick Diamond/Getty Images Country-music legend George Jones, best known for his 1980 hit “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” died today in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’d been hospitalized for the last week, the AP reports. He was 81. Jones, nicknamed the Possum, had his first No. 1 hit in 1959, and he went on to record more than 150 albums over the course of his career, notching thirteen additional No. 1 songs, including “The Grand Tour” and “She Thinks I Still Care.” He was married to Tammy Wynette from 1969 to 1973, but the two continued to perform together and released an album of duets in 1995. Jones was perhaps equally famous for his silky baritone voice — Frank Sinatra once called him “the second best singer in America” — as for his drug-and-alcohol-induced offstage behavior, including a televised police chase through Nashville in 1980. Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992, was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2012. Sources Houston Chronicle AP Rolling Stone … [Read more...] about George Jones, Country-Music Star, Dies at 81

Photo: John Milner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images It’s a famous, queasy Hollywood anecdote that Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone didn’t know that the 1992 erotic thriller’s famous interrogation scene featured a shot directly up her skirt until she saw the completed film. “That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, ‘We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,” the actress says , in a new excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice , out March 30, published in Vanity Fair . “Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: the other points of view are bullshit.” The story is just one example of the gauntlet Stone describes running as an actress working in the industry in the 1980s and ‘90s, perhaps best exemplified by her revelation that a producer allegedly attempted to strong-arm her into sleeping with a male co-star to foster “onscreen chemistry.” Can we not just let the actors act, people?! “I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open,” the actress recalls. “He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should fuck my costar so that we could have onscreen chemistry. Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause.” Says Stone, “I watched the chocolate balls rolling around, thinking, You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test.… Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a costar with talent, … [Read more...] about Sharon Stone Says Producer Pressured Her to Sleep With Male Co-Star to Create ‘Onscreen Chemistry’

Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for TIME Ryan Murphy has already wheeled you through the halls of Nurse Ratched ’s inner workings. Now, in his new series, the American Horror Story creator is escorting you somewhere even more terrifying: Jeffrey Dahmer ’s Milwaukee apartment. According to Variety , Murphy and producer Ian Brennan will be bringing Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story to Netflix in the form of a ten-episode limited series. Unlike previous works about the serial killer, like Dahmer and My Friend Dahmer , Monster will focus less on the titular cannibal, rapist and murderer himself, and more on the “police incompetence and apathy” that enabled Dahmer to pray on mostly young men and boys of color for over a decade. Told from the perspective of his victims, the show will depict “least 10 instances where Dahmer was let go after being apprehended,” huge failures by law enforcement the show will explore through the lens of white privilege, racism, and homophobia. In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 life sentences for fifteen murders, with a separate life sentence added for another murder later that same year. Richard Jenkins is reportedly set to co-star as Dahmer’s father Lionel, Carl Franklin will co-direct, and Janet Mock will write and co-direct the show, with production, at least as of right now, scheduled to begin in January. … [Read more...] about Ryan Murphy’s New Netflix Limited Series to Examine the Police Culture That Enabled Jeffrey Dahmer

Rebecca Blasband trying (and failing) to listen on The Real World Homecoming: New York . Photo: MTV In the first season of The Real World , the roommates who lived in a New York City loft for the sake of an MTV reality show had multiple heated conversations about race. One of the more memorable ones involved Becky Blasband, a white singer-songwriter, and Kevin Powell, a Black poet and activist, who started to argue after Becky contended that America is truly a melting pot with equal opportunities for everyone. (Spoiler alert: It is not!) In last week’s episode of The Real World Homecoming: New York , that back-and-forth was replayed for the seven now-middle-aged roommates who have regathered in the same New York loft for a reality-TV reunion. The clip sparked yet another difficult conversation between Becky, who now goes by Rebecca, and Kevin that spilled over into this week’s third episode. Every white person in America should watch that episode of this Paramount+ series , which is one of the best televised encapsulations of what makes discussions about bias and racism so difficult in this country. The way that Rebecca responds to what Kevin is saying — with defensiveness, deflection, and a stubborn unwillingness to listen — makes it seem like she is trying to check the box next to every item on a list called “How White People Should Not Respond When a Black Person Is Trying to Engage Honestly About Racism.” Days after Piers Morgan stormed off the set of Good Morning Britain due to his comments about Meghan Markle, and Sharon Osbourne, a Morgan defender, broke down in tears when her colleagues on The Talk gently implied she may project some racist views , Rebecca has done a Real World version of the exact same thing. As she and Kevin discuss their disagreement from 1992, Rebecca constantly interrupts him to bring the conversation back to herself. She asks Kevin to “forget about color for a second,” and he notes that telling a Black … [Read more...] about Every White Person Should Watch This Week’s

Photo: Michael Caulfield Archive/WireImage When she performed her nominated song “In the Deep” at the 2006 Academy Awards, Kathleen “Bird” York never acknowledged the burning car onstage behind her. “I didn’t look,” she says. “During rehearsal, I never turned around and looked. I thought, I’m just gonna do what I came here to do. Because it bummed me out, you know?” But how did that happen? How did an indie artist who specialized in yearning restraint wind up singing in front of a flaming sedan? As with so many things about that year’s Oscars ceremony, you can partially blame Crash , that year’s Best Picture winner and lightning rod for criticism and controversy. In late 2002, York got an early version of the script from Paul Haggis, the film’s director and co-writer. She was long established as an actress, having appeared on Dallas as a child and as Toby’s ex-wife, Andrea Wyatt, on The West Wing, but one of her big breaks as a musician had come just a few years earlier, when she wrote several songs for Haggis’s CBS drama Family Law. “Paul and I had a working relationship where he would just hand me a script,” York says. “I wouldn’t see any footage. I would look at the whole script, not a particular scene, and write a song for what I thought encompassed the entire theme of the story.” With Crash, which interweaves the arcs of multiple characters whose lives are upended by racial and sexual violence, the theme that resonated most was the sudden arrival of terrible loss. As she says, “The characters are all at a breaking point in their belief systems, right? Everybody’s kind of coming at their lives in a certain way, and it’s not serving them. And the song was about—” Here, she takes a pause. “I guess I’m just going to be straightforward and honest about it. My brother got diagnosed with AIDS and died in six weeks. He was the closest person to me, and when I was thinking about [the script], I just went there. I saw the theme of the story, … [Read more...] about Revisiting That Infamous Burning-Car Moment From the