Entertainment
Jacob Elordi's good looks get the spotlight in the first 'Saturday Night Live' of 2024
“Saltburn” and “Euphoria” actor and apparent “babygirl” Jacob Elordi hosted “Saturday Night Live” in an episode that inverted the usual “hot girl host” dynamic (see: Emma Stone, Ana de Armas). Instead, multiple sketches featured female cast members fawning over the handsome and very tall Australian actor. They included a “Bachelorette”-type sketch in which Elordi’s height alone secures him a win on a show with otherwise diminutive bachelors called “Crown Your Short King”; one about a women’s AA group that accommodates a man (Elordi) only because he’s handsome and a sex addict (it was as bad as it sounds); and a piece about an acting studio with a guest celebrity (Elordi) who has never had to audition or struggle as an actor because of his good looks.
It would seem like egregious piling on (we get it: he’s good looking!) if Elordi had blown the barn doors off the other sketches in the show that weren’t about his physical appearance. Instead, he struggled with microphone issues throughout the episodes, delivered flat comedic line readings, and never seemed to be in his element anywhere but in the monologue, where he came across as sincerely humbled to be hosting. He’s a fine actor, as “Saltburn” proves, but as a guest host performing sketch comedy…? Let’s just say he was great in “Saltburn.”
Elsewhere on the show, Ego Nwodin played Katt Williams in an ad for an 8-hour version of his infamous “Club Shay Shay” interview, “Entertainment Tonight” brought in lip-reading experts to badly interpret celebrity footage, and a wedding that goes wrong when Garrett from Hinge shows up to disrupt the proceedings.
Elordi was joined on the show by musical guest Reneé Rapp who starred in “Mean Girls,” both the stage musical and film versions. She performed “Snow Angel” and “Not My Fault,” the latter featuring Megan Thee Stallion and was introduced by original “Mean Girls” star Rachel McAdams. McAdams also appeared in the acting studio sketch as a student named Natalie Partman who has the bad luck of looking just like famous actress Rachel McAdams.
This week’s cold open returned to politics after the final “SNL” cold open of 2023 detoured into pop culture with a mock awards show after a disastrous cold open the week before that centered on college campuses and antisemitism hearings. James Austin Johnson took the spotlight with his reliable, and still very accurate, Donald Trump impression. But the shine on the performance may be wearing off a little, despite Trump’s Iowa Caucus win this week. Appearing from a Lower Manhattan U.S. District Court, Johnson’s Trump riffed on his Republican rivals including “Ron DeStupid” and “Darling Nikki” [Haley], promised he’s fine mentally (“Doing great with cognitive. I’m more cognitive than ever!”) and claimed he’s “back like ‘Mean Girls!’ ” before lamenting that actress Lacey Chabert does not appear in the new “Mean Girls” movie. He encouraged old people to, “stay alive till November, pull that lever, and drop dead!” Maybe it’s the fractured Republican presidential race or Trump’s many exhausting trials, but the bit just didn’t feel as fresh or funny as previous openers with Johnson as Trump.
In the monologue for what Elordi described as “the first and so-far best show of 2024,” the actor referenced the viral TikTok videos inspired by “Saltburn” and did a Q&A with the audience, which, again, focused on his how attractive the actor is. It ended on a non-sequitur, name checking a movie from earlier in Elordi’s career, “The Kissing Booth,” which led to Kenan Thompson appearing as a man who apparently kisses a noble elephant he owns. It was in response to Elordi’s question, “Can you name one other animal that kisses?” The monologue ended sincerely with Elordi thanking everyone including the audience for his success. “Because of you, I’m here. So thank you, thank you so much.”
Best sketch of the night: Alaska Airlines is grounded
Alaska Airlines got roasted, unsurprisingly, given the negative attention it’s received after a hole opened up on the side of one of its planes mid-flight earlier this month. In a mock commercial, the airline flips the script on the incident by telling passengers who went through the trauma, “You didn’t die and you got a cool story … Other airlines let you watch movies, but on Alaska, you’re in the movie!” The airline promised a commemorative $50 photo, similar to what you’d get on a Six Flags roller coaster, with every flight and said it plans to employ Sully Sullenberger (Johnson). The sketch’s final insult? “Still better than Spirit!”
Also good: Bowling alley animations get more dramatic
You know those cheesy animations that appear at the bowling alley when you hit a strike or throw a ball into the gutter? A couple on a date (Elordi and Heidi Gardner) are served increasingly elaborate and dramatic mini movies featuring cast members dressed as bowling pins. They include a sad divorce (for “SPLIT!”), a pin getting beat up for not respecting labor unions (“STRIKE!”) and a press conference for a serial killer who has killed NINE! An incredibly silly idea that only rises to the level of second-best sketch of the night due to lack of any other viable candidates.
‘Weekend Update’ winner: A courthouse jumper speaks his peace
Devon Walker appeared as South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who recently dropped out of the presidential race, but he was edged out as the best part of this week’s “Weekend Update” when Punkie Johnson appeared as a defendant from a viral video, who jumped and attacked a judge during a trial. As the defendant, Deobra Redden, Punkie Johnson expressed surprise that the judge wasn’t surrounded by glass (“Even CVS shampoo have some glass, man!”) and praised his own athleticism in the video. It wasn’t the greatest “Weekend Update” guest segment of late, but as with the rest of the episode, it was slim pickings this week.
Movie Reviews
‘House of Criticism’ Review: A Pensive and Touching Portrait of Married Art Critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith (It Is Only, at Moments, a True-Life Christopher Guest Movie)
If you wanted to be funny about it, you could say that Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, who occupy the center of the documentary “House of Criticism,” are like characters out of a Christopher Guest movie. Both are venerable New York art critics — but the thing is, they’re married New York art critics, whose lives revolve entirely around art and art criticism and talking about art and art criticism. They eat, breathe, sleep and dream it. In the Guest mockumentary of my imagination, the two would be played by Bob Balaban and Parker Posey, and they would be blissfully cracked egghead eccentrics who think that art is the most important thing in the world because it’s the most important thing in the world to them.
At moments, “House of Criticism” does throw off unintentional comic sparks of art-world insularity. But I’m kidding, ultimately, since underneath that it’s a pensive and touching documentary, and it happens to be about two writers I greatly admire. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of the New York Times, and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine, are writers of sway, elegance, legend. They’re two of the last powerful legacy critics in America, and both are fantastic writers. For them, the love of art is a mission, at once sophisticated and childlike. Roberta calls art “the most advanced operating system that our species has devised to explore consciousness, the seen and the unseeable.” The way art connects (and saves) these two on a daily basis is its own rarefied story, and it speaks to a certain vanishing culture of passionate New York literary brainiacs that used to be thought of as almost the essence of the city.
Early on, Jerry stands before Picasso’s epochal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art and does a head-spinning riff on it, describing how 500 years of art history collapsed in the late 19th century (through Manet, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Cezanne), leaving the blank slate for Picasso to fill. He compares the way the painting remade the world to the cataclysm of 9/11 (“When we believed in one course of history, and obviously there was another course of history, and they shattered”). Now that’s criticism.
As “House of Criticism” shows us, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are luminaries and survivors who enjoy an idealized life together. Roberta is something of a contradiction, both the haughtier and more vulnerable of the two. She can be imperious in that Timesian way, but there’s a tremulous insecurity about her. Beneath a certain Midwestern patrician rigor, she’s full of self-doubt about her writing and is in constant need of encouragement, which Jerry is more than happy to provide. He’s blustery and big picture-oriented, while her insights are more delicate and intimate, blooming out of her holy communion with the work.
Jerry is a contradiction as well, a man who writes like a demon and looks like a dentist. But don’t let his fubsy aura fool you — he’s the social butterfly and loose cannon, plugged into social media (which he plays like a violin), and the audacious thoughts pour out of him. The most telling aspect of their relationship is that as writers they should be competitors, but instead they’re spiritual collaborators; they turn what could be a competition into a romance. They help each other on word choices, and even when they’re reviewing the same show, they’re really competing with themselves, with their own cultivated and highly different ideas of perfectionism.
Their relationship is built, to a large degree, around Jerry’s belief that Roberta is the superior critic — but this, for Jerry, is a form of chivalry, the flower of their love story. “Your writing is so condensed, right on the object, focused,” he says. He’s intensely supportive, but Jerry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018, is arguably the greater writer (his poetic showmanship flies higher), and it’s my reading that deep down he knows it. It’s his perpetual self-deprecation and devotion that keeps the marriage balanced.
The two have no children and no apparent hobbies outside of their unrelenting obsession with art. They slip in and out of gallery openings, where they’re treated like royalty, and they attend 20 to 30 shows a week. By all rights, they should have a social calendar that rivals Andy Warhol’s in the ’70s. But here’s the joke: They adore their life together but are so devoted to their work, so monastic about it, that they never go out. Jerry calls them “happy losers” and describes their spacious apartment off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village as “the house that criticism built.”
In the morning, he pours deli coffee over ice into a 7-11 Big Gulp cup, and he’ll consume three of those a day. It’s fuel, as is the food he eats. When his friend Adam Platt, the New York magazine restaurant critic, asks Jerry what his favorite food is, Jerry replies: the grilled chicken at Gristede’s (a slightly downscale New York supermarket). “That’s the life of the mind!” says Platt. “You’re as happy with prison food.” He’s not kidding. I live in the same neighborhood and use Gristede’s as a convenience store, and I would never consider buying the grilled chicken there. But as Jerry explains, popping a bag of spinach into the microwave, he and Roberta are so consumed with work that they subsist on this drone food. The two barely go to restaurants (though we see them having breakfast at their favorite diner). Do they drink? If I was them, I’d need a cocktail by the end of the day, but the movie never says.
“House of Criticism,” directed by Alison Chernick, has a sketchy but rather controlled vantage. There’s a lot you don’t learn (I would have liked to see more about the politics of the New York art world), and plenty you do — like the fact that Lena Dunham is their goddaughter. Late in the movie, she comes over to visit them and provokes a penetrating exchange on the subject of why they never had kids.
People don’t often think of critics in humanistic terms, but these two invest criticism with soul, and there’s something disarming about how they were both damaged people who came together by seeing, in each other, a mirror image. She was born in New York and raised in Kansas, moving back to Manhattan in her early twenties to be part of the art scene (her mentor was the artist and critic Donald Judd). She found her way to criticism as a role in life, yet there was something metaphysically lonely about her.
It’s Jerry who comes from trauma. His mother, who committed suicide when he was 10, was erased out of his life (she was never spoken of again). He tells a haunting story about how she dropped him off for a solo visit to the Art Institute of Chicago just two weeks before her death, and it was there, on that visit, that the art lightbulb went off: He realized that every painting is a story. He wanted to be a painter, and tried (he had some talent), but thought that he lacked the proper schooling. What he really lacked was confidence. In photographs from the time, Jerry looks like he could be Richard Dreyfuss’s sad-sack brother. He wound up becoming a long-distance trucker, driving 10-wheelers full of paintings (he did this for 10 years), and he confesses that at moments he would go back into the truck and stomp on paintings and damage them. That is seriously sick behavior (his self-hatred was off the charts), and it’s amazing that he became the menschy person he did.
These two have thrived as critics by evolving. Jerry says of critics, “We have to adapt to the times, or we’re bullies and geezers.” He’s right. The film culminates in Roberta’s ultimate evolution — her decision to retire from the New York Times. The time feels right, but the question hovers: Without that job, what will her identity be? In a moving moment, she tells Jerry, “You’re my infrastructure.” “You’re mine,” he says. (That’s the critic version of “You complete me.”) And seeing each other through the prism of art is both of their infrastructure. These two are standard-bearers for the glory of a culture that once was. It’s a culture where criticism is about judging things, but more than that it’s about exploring things — experiencing things, bringing you closer to life.
In the last decade or so, Angelina Jolie has been on screen less frequently. So when she is — and not in forgettable tentpoles like “Eternals” — it’s worth paying attention. There seems to be a thoughtful intentionality to the roles she now chooses, almost as if this astoundingly famous woman wants to tell us something vital about herself, offering clues into her understandably guarded personal life.
Take 2015’s “By the Sea,” which she wrote and directed. Coincidentally or not, that pained study of marital dissolution, co-starring Jolie’s then-husband Brad Pitt, intersected with the couple’s real-life breakup — not to mention Jolie’s grief over the death of her mother, Marcheline Bertrand. Two years ago, Jolie portrayed a version of the elusive, emotionally closed-off opera singer Maria Callas in “Maria.” The conception of the role, marked by a dim view of stardom’s suffocating alienation, was something Jolie clearly understood. Moviegoers should be careful not to read too much autobiography into an actor’s creative choices, but Jolie makes such speculation tantalizing, adding additional layers of drama to her films.
The intermittently affecting “Couture” feels similarly close to her heart, depicting a filmmaker whose life is interrupted by a cancer diagnosis — a reality Jolie knows all too well. In 2013, she underwent a preventive double mastectomy over concerns of her likelihood to develop breast or ovarian cancer. (Bertrand died of cancer in 2007.) Knowledge of Jolie’s circumstance will inform a viewer’s reaction to her wounded, resilient performance, but our inherent sympathies can only take French writer-director Alice Winocour’s ensemble piece so far.
Jolie plays Maxine, an American indie director hired to create a flashy opening film for Paris Fashion Week. Newly arrived in the City of Light, she has only a few days to put together the short, assisted by her trusted cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel). As we deduce from the phone calls Maxine makes back home, she’s also going through an acrimonious divorce and has trouble connecting with her blasé teenage daughter. At least this Paris paycheck gig will bolster her finances — and get her ready for the feature film she’s been wanting to make for years.
Just then, though, Maxine’s future gets a rewrite. A French doctor (Vincent London) tells her she has breast cancer and needs a double mastectomy immediately. Maybe she can finish the Fashion Week film, but her passion project must wait. An artist and mother who has spent her adulthood in constant motion will have to learn what it means to stop everything and be still.
The film’s title would appear to be a reference to the story’s setting, but in French, “coutures” can also mean “stitches,” and indeed Winocour sews together three thematically linked story strands. As Maxine wrestles with her cancer diagnosis, an inexperienced South Sudanese model named Ada (Anyier Anei) works Fashion Week so she can send money home to her family. (Ada has no interest in modeling, hoping instead to become a pharmacist.) Meanwhile a makeup artist, Angèle (Ella Rumpf), longs to be an author, although she cannot get anyone interested in her writing. Each one becomes a part of the fabric of Fashion Week, but their disparate problems are a far cry from the glitzy event’s self-importance.
Winocour has often made films about women balancing their public-facing life with their private selves In 2019’s “Proxima,” Eva Green played an astronaut missing her young daughter. In 2022’s “Paris Memories,” Virginie Efira starred as an interpreter recovering from the shock of surviving a terrorist attack. Winocour shows us the intimate, vulnerable spaces within her characters that those on the outside don’t have access to.
“Couture’s” three principals rarely interact with one another, but those meaningful exchanges argue that, amid the mad clatter of the everyday, a brief, unguarded moment with a stranger can be supremely restorative. Unfortunately, the juggling of storylines ends up being more schematic than insightful. Angèle’s narrative never catches fire and while Anei is striking as Ada, that section of the film feels slightly patronizing, reducing this immigrant tale to yet another strained salute to perseverance.
This leaves Jolie as the movie’s magnetic center, with Maxine drifting through despair as she ponders what to do. Her doctor insists that the surgery cannot wait, but putting her ambitions on hold means losing a part of herself — a different kind of death sentence than the one she’s now facing.
The character is underwritten but Jolie picks up much of the slack through her silently shattered expression. As she’s gotten older, the Oscar winner has become more comfortable doing less in her performances, allowing for a fragile serenity that is belied by the anguish and anxiety roiling underneath. It’s not just our recognition of the real-life parallels that make Jolie so touching in “Couture” — it’s that ineffable star power she’s possessed for so long. In a story about a potential tragedy, what’s saddest is that Winocour’s film cannot match its lead’s effortless command.
‘Couture’
In French and English, with subtitles
Rated: R, for language, some sexuality, nudity and brief bloody violence
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, June 26 in limited release
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 26th, 2026 / 08:03 PM
SUPERGIRL movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros./DC Studios
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Milly Adcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jason Momoa, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Writer: Ana Nogueira, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
Director: Craig Gillespie
Distributor: Warner Bros./DC Studios
Release Date: June 26, 2026
The new SUPERGIRL doesn’t have that “Eureka! This is how you do this now” spark that galvanized its immediate franchise predecessor, last year’s SUPERMAN. Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira, basing the film on characters created by DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, probably wisely, aren’t going for that.
Instead, the SUPERGIRL makers are intent on providing a lively adventure, getting to the point quickly and letting the action unspool with unquestionably strong motivation, abetted by plenty of punch-ups, kicking and frequent explosions.
Supergirl, aka Kara Zor-El (Milly Adcock), is from the now-dead planet Krypton, just like her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet). However, where Clark has chosen to remain on Earth, where the yellow sun gives him superpowers that allow to help Earth’s residents, Kara likes to party on planets that have a red sun, where she has no unusual abilities.
This is because Kara seems to have taken to heart a dictum from a different comic book universe – with great power comes great responsibility – and decided the inverse is true: with no power comes no responsibility.
We get insight into exactly why Kara is so duty-averse over the course of SUPERGIRL, and it’s probably not a spoiler to say that she re-examines some attitudes as events unfold.
Kara plans to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on a backwater red sun planet. The bar where Kara chooses to drink is entered by preteen Ruthye Knoll (Eve Ridley), whose family has been murdered by brigands, led by the horrendous Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye is out for revenge. Kara thinks Ruthye is a bit young and pure-hearted to be on a murderous quest.
Even on a planet with a red sun, though, Kara is still handy with fists and feet. Ruthye sees what Kara can do and concludes she is the ideal ally. Kara absolutely refuses to help. Then something occurs that credibly rouses Kara to do whatever it takes to achieve her aims, which sort of line up with Ruthye’s.
No explanation is needed for why Kara feels such urgency, which we easily share. Her concern for Ruthye is understandable and her connecting to larger purpose is shown rather than spoken.
Intriguingly, the aesthetics of SUPERGIRL are largely those of STAR WARS, with some MAD MAX and BLADE RUNNER thrown in. The filmmakers have a good time with all sorts of utterly nonhuman alien people and figuring out how to make interplanetary versions of familiar items like vending machines.
The pace is pleasingly brisk and the structure doesn’t require much exposition. When they hit a hard-to-answer question like why Kara is Supergirl while Clark is Superman, they acknowledge it and then get out from under without irritating anybody.
For anyone wondering about the veracity of the recording from Superman’s parents that appeared in SUPERMAN, a quick line of dialogue here confirms it (sorry, Jor-El supporters).
There is the expected amount of CGI involved, including a great motion-capture performance by Kara’s dog Krypto (modeled upon executive producer/SUPERMAN director James Gunn’s dog), but a lot of the stunts and makeup appear gratifyingly practical.
Adcock is fine in all of Kara’s moods, from wasted to resistant to determined, with a delightful reaction to feeling her body’s response to the yellow sun. Ridley is an appealing young hero, and Corenswet offers wholesome support. Schoenaerts lets Krem revel in his own soft-spoken vileness, and Jason Momoa enthusiastically portrays an intergalactic bounty hunter. David Krumholtz is affecting as Kara’s scientist father.
SUPERGIRL isn’t going to redefine superhero movies, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable example of the form.
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