Entertainment
Chris Rock hosts a shaky 'SNL' saved by guest star Adam Sandler
There’s no denying that Chris Rock is a comedy legend, but that’s not because of the time he spent on “Saturday Night Live” from 1990 to 1993.
The former cast member, who rocketed to stardom post-”SNL” with his blistering stand-up comedy, returned to host for the fourth time this week. This time out, he made the biggest impact in his barbed and topical monologue and in a couple of pre-taped pieces — not in the live sketches, where he seemed slow to react or have difficulty reading lines off cue cards.
Even with those issues, Rock still managed to sell the first main sketch of the night, about a Christmas mall elf giving parents the uncomfortable choice between a white Santa (James Austin Johnson) and a Black Santa (Devon Walker) for their kids. It was similar in vibe to the video “Grandpa’s Magic Car,” about a Herbie-like 1950s car that has human-esque qualities but also happens to be racist. Rock’s brief appearance in a video about a tedious office Christmas party also worked well.
Less successful: a Secret Santa sketch that pivoted on the gift of making Rock look like a “Simpsons” character; one about two men from the same building (Rock and Kenan Thompson) accused of sexually harassing employees; and a late-in-the-show sketch about a man hijacking someone else’s blind date with Ego Nwodim’s character.
The biggest surprise, one that perked up an otherwise mixed bag of an episode, was Adam Sandler showing up as the patient in a surgery sketch. He bleeds all over cast members Emil Wakim, Sarah Sherman, Nwodim and Bowen Yang as well as Rock while breaking the fourth wall and commenting on the show. It was unclear how much of that was improvised, but it sure seemed like Sandler was having a good time trying to make Rock break character.
Musical guest Gracie Abrams gave two solid performances in her “SNL” debut with songs “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry.”
Nancy Grace, the host of YouTube’s “Crime Stories With Nancy Grace,” has been an “SNL” mainstay since long before YouTube even existed. She was previously played by cast members Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler, but now Sarah Sherman has taken over the role and given Grace a hugely exaggerated drawl and a more manic demeanor. In the show’s cold open, she called Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a “Mordoror” and chastised America for making the suspected killer a sex symbol. Grace mocked Mangione for looking like “Dave Franco with Eugene Levy’s eyebrows” and revealed that she wants a “Ghost gun” like the one allegedly used in the crime because, “Every night I wake up to Jon Benet’s spirit screaming, ‘You used me!’” Because it’s on YouTube, her show kept getting interrupted by ads for supplement pills.
When Chris Rock started his monologue, the comedian sounded out of breath, as if he’d run up flights of stairs at 30 Rock to get to the stage. But he settled in before too long after congratulating producer Lorne Michaels on “25 great years of ‘Saturday Night Live’” — on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. From there, Rock bore down on targets including Mangione (“If he looked like Jonah Hill… they’d already have given him the chair”), Mike Tyson’s boxing opponent Jake Paul (“Is this what the white man has reduced himself to? Who’s he going to fight next, Morgan Freeman?”) and president-elect Donald Trump’s amazing year (“It could happen to a nicer guy”).
The monologue got thornier as it went, with Rock speculating on American presidents who could be considered rapists (“You know how many rapists are in my wallet right now? A cup of coffee in America costs seven rapists”) and about which Latinos Trump might deport. “J. Lo’s gonna marry Ben (Affleck) again just so she can stay in the country,” he said. “I know she’s not Mexican… but Trump doesn’t know that.” If it lacked the thoughtful sharpness of his best stand-up, the monologue was at least a reminder that when he gets in a groove, Rock takes no prisoners.
Best sketch of the night: The office Christmas party starts at 5:45 p.m. on a Tuesday
The lameness of office holiday parties is well-trod comedic territory, but this pre-taped sketch hit all the right notes on why keeping employees who only know each other through work together after hours is a bad idea. From the laptop-music fail to the revelation of OnlyFans accounts to “The soggiest food you’ve ever seen… so wet,” the video used awkward zoom-ins and a wide variety of characters to get its point across, the high point being Rock and Nwodim playing a married couple who get into an argument about the husband’s “work wife.” Best detail? The 45-minute Secret Santa with a giant white board chart that seems to never end.
Also good: The surgery is terrible, but stay for the bleeding
What started off as a sketch about a hapless assistant named Leslie (Sherman) messing up a gallbladder procedure morphed into something completely different when former “SNL” cast member Sandler was revealed to be the patient under the sheet. After a few moments of technical difficulties, Sandler was able to get a blood squirter working and doused everyone else, including his former castmate Rock. It was one of those moments that got funnier the longer it went on, with Sandler riffing and nobody exactly sure what to do next. It’s hard to fake that kind of spontaneity and in Sandler’s (bloody) hands, the sketch went from a potential miss to something with real viral potential.
‘Weekend Update’ winner: How many bald jokes is too many bald jokes?
New cast member Jane Wickline performed a clever and funny song about why people don’t speculate about pop singer Sabrina Carpenter’s sexuality. But as smart as it was, it couldn’t shine quite as brightly as Andrew Dismukes’ head as he played a hairless man reveling in a months-old case from England in which calling a man “Bald” could constitute sexual harassment. Dismukes advised “Weekend Update” co-host Colin Jost that “My eyes are down here” and recounted the time he was on a jury with 11 other bald men and they were described as looking like a carton of eggs. This could have been just a string of bald jokes, but Dismukes has a way of playing this type of character with absolute seriousness. Let’s just say he did a good job getting into the character’s, uh… headspace.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
Entertainment
Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day
Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.
An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.
“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”
The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.
Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”
Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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