Entertainment
Taylor Swift turns heel, owning her chaos and messiness on 'The Tortured Poets Department’
Taylor Swift has spent years warning us not to believe everything we hear about her. As the biggest star of pop music’s parasocial age, she argues that the facts of her existence are constantly warped by gossip and misinformation, which is one reason the Easter eggs and coded messages she’s long built into her work have helped create such a tight bond between her and her fans. Pay close enough attention, the thinking goes, and her art will always tell you the truth.
Except when it doesn’t.
Toward the end of her juicy new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift unloads a sparky electro-pop song called “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” In the song she essentially admits that last summer, as she was crisscrossing the country on her record-breaking (and far from finished) Eras tour — a show centered on her constantly living her best life — the singer was actually falling apart inside.
“They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it,’ and I did,” she sings over a whooshing groove that feels like it’s slowly picking up speed, “Lights, camera — bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die.” These are the makings of a very sad song, but “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic. The point isn’t that she suffered through this experience — it’s that she soldiered through it. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” she crows in her perkiest voice, explaining why in the next line: “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like a plague.”
Swift’s 11th studio LP, released at midnight Eastern time, follows a busy period in the 34-year-old’s personal and professional spheres: Beyond launching the Eras tour, which itself followed 2022’s hugely successful “Midnights” album, Swift — deep breath here — broke up with Joe Alwyn, the English actor with whom she was in a romantic relationship for more than half a decade; had a reported dalliance with Matty Healy of the 1975 that ended amid an uproar over offensive comments he made about Ice Spice; notched insane commercial numbers with re-recordings of two of her older albums; took the Eras production into movie theaters; and, oh, yeah, started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs before his team won Super Bowl LVIII in February.
Its sound pitched somewhere between the synth-soaked “Midnights” and 2020’s rootsy “Folklore,” “Tortured Poets” touches on all this, not least the split with Alwyn, whom she portrays in songs like “So Long, London” as a cold and disinterested partner. “I stopped trying to make him laugh / Stopped trying to drill the safe,” she sings. She also details the link-up with Kelce, whose NFL victory she evokes in “The Alchemy”: “Trying to be the greatest in the league / Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me.”
Yet this isn’t the breakup album — or the new-love album — you might’ve expected. Swift doesn’t portray herself precisely as a victim as she did in old tunes such as “Dear John” or “All Too Well,” to name two of her masterpieces about unscrupulous men; nor is there anything dewy-eyed about “The Alchemy,” which likens falling for a new guy to a chemical imbalance. The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies. This mind-set comes to light particularly in a handful of songs that appear to be about Healy, the edgelord rock star whom she alternately roasts as a selfish junkie in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and describes as the only guy crazy enough to match her in the title track.
“But Daddy I Love Him” is the album’s finest cut: a garment-rending folk-rock melodrama in which Swift seems to excoriate her audience for its disapproval of her and Healy’s affair. “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning,” she sings, going on to compare her pearl-clutching fans to “judgmental creeps” and “vipers dressed in empaths’ clothing.” In a time of stan culture run amok, it’s thrilling to hear a superstar address her followers this way — and wild to imagine the response among those she’s relied on to fork over untold sums for concert tickets and collectible vinyl editions of her records.
In its cheerful bad vibes, “Tortured Poets” registers as a clean break from the therapized self-care pop heard lately from the likes of Ariana Grande and Kacey Musgraves. Swift isn’t seeking betterment in these songs about emotional trauma and its aftermath; if anything, she’s taking a perverse satisfaction in her unwillingness to learn someone else’s lessons. (In a funny twist, the A-list pop star she’s most closely aligned with right now is her frenemy Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Guts” maps a similar emotional terrain.)
We’ve encountered this Taylor before: More than anything she’s done since, “Tortured Poets” feels like the spiritual successor to 2017’s “Reputation,” which took a devious glee in dealing with the fallout of her feuds with various famous people. Indeed, many fans thought she intended to announce her “Taylor’s Version” remake of “Reputation” at February’s Grammy Awards, where she won album of the year for a record fourth time with “Midnights”; wearing black and white à la “Reputation’s” cover, she instead revealed that she’d made “Tortured Poets,” whose artwork shares a color palette with the earlier LP.
As on “Reputation,” Swift delights in depicting herself as the bad guy, as in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” where she insists, “I was gentle till the circus life made me mean.” And that happy participation in pop’s celebrity death match is a crucial distinction from recent work by Billie Eilish and Lorde, who seem perpetually on the lookout for an escape from the highly scrutinized lives they’ve created. “I cry a lot, but I am so productive,” Swift sings in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which ends with a flex — “Try and come for my job” — as chilling as it is hilarious.
All this lore — it’s a lot. Yet “The Tortured Poets Department” also showcases Swift’s gifts as a songwriter, musician and producer. Her melodies are sticky and her arrangements grabby; working in the studio with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she’s honed an electro-acoustic style that’s instantly identifiable (even if that’s sometimes because she recycles a melodic figure she’s used before). Post Malone’s scratchy croon adds a welcome wrinkle to the album’s opener, “Fortnight,” while Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine ups the theater-kid intensity of “Florida!!!”
As a singer, Swift explores the sultrier lower depths of her range in “Fresh Out the Slammer” and the Fleetwood Mac-ish “Guilty as Sin?”; as a lyricist, she leans into detail in a way she didn’t quite on “Midnights,” fondly recalling a conversation with maybe-Healy in the title track where the two of them “declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” (!) and perfectly capturing the mid-30s position in “Florida!!!” with a line about how “my friends all smell like weed or little babies.”
“Tortured Poets” closes with the slow-and-low “Clara Bow,” titled after the early-cinema It girl, in which Swift thinks through the all ways that show business has been chewing up — or trying to chew up — beautiful young women for the last 100 years. It starts with Bow, then moves up to Stevie Nicks before landing on someone who looks in this light like … Taylor Swift, which is truly a name you haven’t heard pronounced until Taylor Swift herself says it.
“You’ve got edge she never did,” the song’s narrator tells the woman — one more provocation on an album full of them.
Entertainment
Review: ‘Star Wars’ wends its way back to theaters via an unlikely duo in ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
Nearly 50 years on from “Star Wars” and the launch of a media empire (large or small “e”? You decide), the fandom has become its own galaxy of warring planets. But based on the success of the streaming series “The Mandalorian,” set around the title bounty hunter, we can all agree that his charge Grogu — green, wrinkled, big-eyed Baby You-Know-Who — is still adorable. Of the many “Star Wars” offshoots, this seems to be the sturdiest.
The brand is back together for “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which is a movie, a hoped-for franchise revival, a fourth season of sorts and an affable throwback. But it’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].
The expectations game was never going to help series creator Jon Favreau’s big-screen version, written with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor. Granted, this upscaled, agreeably rangy treatment of an adventure storyline that wouldn’t have been out of place on the show could have attempted more. Especially when it puts sci-fi icon Sigourney Weaver in an X-wing pilot uniform as a veteran of the Rebellion, but barely gives her anything to do besides secure Mando a job and keep tabs on his progress. (Gang, try harder. It’s Sigourney Weaver.)
Aimed squarely at kids of all sizes, “Star Wars” has become a glorified tour of a billionaire’s expanding playworld and “The Mandalorian and Grogu” wants the track well-oiled, not bumpy. The simple pleasures here of good vs evil, IMAX hugeness and composer Ludwig Göransson’s space-opera-hits-the-club score, go down easy enough to not be aggravating. It’s a lot.
But it’s not this reviewer’s position to tell you what “a lot” is — loose lips spoil scripts. When the moment comes at an appropriately dangerous time for our heroes, we sense the kind of thing that only movies can do well when they’re myths writ large: slow things down, shift momentum away from the tyranny of exposition and let emotion, humor, wonder and character co-exist. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” takes the series’ thematic underpinnings — what parenting looks like between a masked human loner and an otherworldly toddler — and deepens them.
The movie takes place in wonderfully detailed environments that evoke the earlier, beloved films. You’re not being pandered to, however; the payoff is a lovely echo. Elsewhere, the action set pieces are serviceably handled by Favreau. (One of them plays like, of all things, an homage to “The French Connection.”)
Otherwise, this is another hunt-and-retrieve narrative for the bounty hunter voiced by Pedro Pascal, physically embodied in armor by Brendan Wayne and, in combat, by fight choreographer Lateef Crowder. Still independent but New Republic-curious, Mando is tasked by Weaver’s Col. Ward to find a wayward scion of the slimy gangster Hutt clan, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), whose return will unlock some important information. Of course, things don’t go as planned, which for a while is interesting — are the Hutts like the Corleones, perhaps? — until it’s not, because then the dialogue would need to rise above the level of a middle-school play.
That being said, one of the movie’s strong points, absent its story deficiencies, is that, across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish famously says in “The Night of the Hunter,” a movie nobody will ever confuse with “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” But we all know summer fare like this is only ever as enjoyable as the monsters conjured up for conquering.
‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
In English and Huttese, with subtitles
Rated: PG-13, for sci-fi violence and action
Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, May 22 in wide release
Memories of cinema past and present come rushing at you like 2001’s Star Gate sequence in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first return to cinema since 2016’s Neon Demon and his first project since dying for 20 minutes from a serious heart condition three years ago. Somehow, it was excluded from the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition in favor of films that look very much like 20th-century television, but so far Refn’s film is the only suggestion at this year’s event that one of its key directors is even remotely curious as to what the real future of film might look like — as opposed to a mess of known IP and AI recreations of people who’ve been dead for 50 years. It seems the French, who once disdained le cinema du papa, have a little bit of catching-up to do.
The film it most closely corresponds to is last year’s Resurrection by China’s Bi Gan, another awake-dream that aims to haunt rather than entertain (although the two things are by no means mutually exclusive). In terms of art, it brings to mind ballet, since so much of what’s important in that medium is hardly what you’d call storytelling in the Hollywood narrative sense. To expand on that further, it would be impossible to discuss the power of this film without mentioning Pino Donaggio’s phenomenal score. Bringing much-needed context to Refn’s style-overload, Donaggio’s achingly emotional soundtrack guides the film in a way music hasn’t since the early silents, or the heyday of Powell & Pressburger, and even, at a push, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger.
What’s it about? Whatever you like. The setting is a surreal futuristic Japanese city of the most unrealistic high-rise kind, and at the story’s core is Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is about to make a film with a younger influencer type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is obsessed with fame and obsessed with Elle, and the whole film draws quite heavily, in a similarly symbiotic way (whether knowingly or not), on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, which no genre director ever has ever not found endlessly fascinating. As they prepare for the shoot, Hunter meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former lover and now her father’s new wife. It’s a complication that obviously hurts, but Hunter is either slow on the uptake or, more likely, couldn’t really care less.
If we’re going to apply film-school formalism to a film that intends to live rent-free in your imagination whether you want it there or not, the “inciting incident” that the girls see a murder in a nearby tower block, and a young woman is defenestrated. It corresponds to the myth of The Leather Man, a tormented, Orpheus-like demon with piercing red eyes and razor-sharp diamond-studded gloves who stalks and kills young women in a bid to replace the daughter he lost to the underworld. We then jump-cut to a scene from a breathlessly exciting space movie, with Elle starring as the leader of an female sci-fi movie that looks like a fantastic space-opera version of Tarantino’s Fox Force Five and which serves as a reminder of Refn’s past interest in remaking Barbarella.
Things get more puzzling and more interesting — depending, of course, on your tolerance for ambiguity — with the arrival of Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI on the trail of The Leather Man, avenging mistreated women wherever he sees them, and drawn like a moth to the dress shop where he used to shop for his now-missing daughter. Private K isn’t at all connected to the main story, but as in Refn’s Thailand-set horror-thriller Only God Forgives, there is a sense that, somehow, justice can be willed into life in the east, and there is a sense that — perhaps — Elle has somehow summoned Private K into being, as the father she will never have.
How does it all fit together? Well, it does and it doesn’t, and Refn leaves you alone to figure out the true significance of The Leather Man and his two fabulously gnomic assistants (Ms. S and Ms. T). The genius of Her Private Hell is that, like a kind of visual ASMR, it offers nothing really concrete, just a lot of satisfying triggers and sensory associations. The actors feel that energy too, and the performances almost dare you to follow them, experimenting wildly with their characters in ways that make only the most subliminal kind of sense.
Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema; where once critics used to applaud Luis Bunuel for casting two actresses as the same character in 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, now they castigate Christopher Nolan for putting Elliott Page in The Odyssey.
Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side.
Title: Her Private Hell
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Distributor: Neon
Running time: 1 hrs 49 mins
It’s a tight three-way race at the top, with a second helping of “Beef,” which won eight Emmys for its first serving, barely ahead of Richard Gadd’s “Baby Reindeer” follow-up, and a suburban noir with abundant heart from Steven Conrad, the maker of “Patriot.”
Glenn Whipp says, “ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men.”
While Lorraine Ali calls “Half Man” “the series to watch in this race,” not all of her Buzzy buddies are as enthusiastic: “I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow-up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here,” says Kristen Baldwin, “but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait.’ ”
Tracy Brown says, “Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries” such as “Half Man,” but “ ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
The twice-cooked “Beef” isn’t to all the panelists’ tastes, either. Matt Roush says it “left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
More predictions: Limited / TV movie actor | Limited / TV movie actress
1.“Beef”
2. “Half Man”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
6. “The Beast in Me”
7. “Bait”
8. “Lord of the Flies””
Los Angeles Times
Lorraine Ali
1. “Half Man”
2. “Bait”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“ ‘Half Man’ is the series to watch in this race, but what should you watch on your screen at home? ‘Bait,’ which follows a struggling British Pakistani actor (Riz Ahmed) as he auditions to become the next James Bond. Is the world ready for a brown Bond? Not really. Hilarity ensues.”
Freelance Critic
Kristen Baldwin
1. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
2. “Beef”
3. “The Beast in Me”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow–up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here, but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait,’ a surreal blend of showbiz satire and immigrant-family comedy.”
Los Angeles Times
Tracy Brown
1. “Beef”
2. “DTF St. Louis”
3. “All Her Fault”
4. “Lord of the Flies”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries. I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘Baby Reindeer’ creator Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ is among the nominees, but ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
Blavity
Trey Mangum
1. “Half Man”
2. “Beef”
3. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “DTF St. Louis”
“ ‘Love Story’ was the talk of the town when it first premiered, but the last few episodes seemed to have landed softly with the majority of people. I think later entries ‘Beef’ and ‘Half Man’ are immediately dominating conversations, and at the right time.”
TV Insider
Matt Roush
1. “Half Man”
2. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
3. “Beef”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“Not the strongest field this year, though Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ and Ryan Murphy’s ‘Love Story’ seem unstoppable. The offbeat ‘DTF St. Louis’ might be a spoiler. Season 2 of Netflix’s ‘Beef’ left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
Los Angeles Times
Glenn Whipp
1. “DTF St. Louis”
2. “Beef”
3. “Half Man”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
“ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men. The cast — Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday — is superb. Emmy noms for all!”
-
Health4 minutes agoWoman says she’s being held against her will after cruise ship hantavirus scare
-
Sports10 minutes agoNFL owners unanimously vote to bring Super Bowl LXIV to Nashville’s new $2 billion stadium in 2030
-
Technology16 minutes agoRideable robot looks ready to stomp all over us
-
Business22 minutes agoCommentary: A surge in Nevada data center construction threatens the electricity supply for 49,000 Californians
-
Entertainment28 minutes ago
Review: ‘Star Wars’ wends its way back to theaters via an unlikely duo in ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
-
Lifestyle34 minutes agoChanel Returns to Growth as Blazymania Kicks In
-
Politics40 minutes agoHilton and Becerra lead in a tightening race in final weeks of California governor’s campaign, poll shows
-
Science46 minutes ago3 countries. 16 stadiums. 104 matches. 2026 World Cup set to become ‘most polluting’ games ever
