America

New DC head honcho James Gunn has found his Superman and Lois Lane, casting David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan in the iconic roles for his reboot of the franchise, Superman: Legacy. The choices seem surprisingly predictable for the off-the-wall Gunn, who reportedly had considered Nicholas Hoult for the cape. Instead, we get a rising star who has the physical look of Henry Cavill Jr. and an established actress in the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Brosnahan, who seems tailor-made to portray a wisecracking stronger Lois type. Cavill's tenure as Superman was frustrating for many fans and the actor as well. He seemed hampered by the movies built around him — Man of Steel with its controversial death toll, Batman v.

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.

All the way across the Atlantic, the British literary world has been seized by John Donne fever. Katherine Rundell’s biography of the metaphysical priest-poet has led to excitable chattering about his life and work. The book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, will be released in the US in September — a significant enough delay as to make the Declaration of Independence look like a mistake. Aside from radically different publication dates (again: would you rather have lower taxes and freedom from George III, or a brilliant Donne biography?), the specter of the far-off American continent has long since loomed large in Donne studies.

The hit series Emily in Paris is being eviscerated by the media. Despite labeling it “Netflix’s most-hated show,” “a catastrophe of culture,” and “inedible tripe,” high-minded critics sure are spending a lot of time and website space talking about it. I am all about scrutinizing art (if we can call Emily “art”) to extract something meaningful. But in the following analysis, I will argue why we should absolutely stop analyzing Emily in Paris. First of all, I don’t understand why critics are disappointed not to find the answer to some weighty Descartian theory in a show whose descriptor reads: “After landing her dream job in Paris, Chicago marketing exec Emily Cooper embraces her adventurous new life while juggling work, friends and romance.