Jackson McCarthy

Music, Fashion, Film Charli xcx shows no signs of stopping As I wrote earlier this year, Charli xcx has known for a while now that she needs to escape out from under the towering legacy of her 2024 opus brat. She’d been an important left-of-field pop star since at least 2017’s mixtape Pop 2, but brat was bigger than anyone could’ve anticipated. One of the more lucid pleasures of my life—and for music kids like myself—was rolling to Charli deep cuts like “Track 10” in a field full of...

Heartstopper’s film finale is so shaky it risks toppling the show that preceded it In Heartstopper Forever, the feature-length film that closes out the eponymous TV series, things have changed. Once-bullied gay kid Charlie Spring is running for Head Boy, and, on the high of his emotional campaign speech, he clinches it. Now, it’s his gorgeous and popular jock boyfriend, Nick Nelson, who, nearing the end of his high school career, is staring down the barrel of loneliness and uncertainty. It’s...

Who’s Afraid of Ethical Non-Monogamy? The Invite is one of this year’s best (and funniest) films Mild spoilers ahead. Nobody in this damned country remembers Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the last century’s nastiest and most nastily brilliant playscripts. An eviscerating document of a marriage falling apart at one epic dinner party in which nobody is allowed to leave (much less consume food), it's the closest literary antecedent to the latest Olivia Wilde film The...