By Tessa Nolan A beauty pageant is never just about beauty. In its own strange, sequined way, it has always been a form of soft-power…
By Tessa Nolan In the carefully choreographed theatre of British royalty, the most radical act is not rebellion, but disappearance. To simply walk away, not…
By Tessa Nolan There is a prison built of gold, and Sean Connery lived in it for most of his adult life. The prison was…
By Tessa Nolan There is a particular quality of light in Moscow at the end of August. It’s a low, golden light that seems to…
By Tessa Nolan Hollywood loves a wunderkind, and after the sleeper success of 2022’s Barbarian, Zach Cregger was anointed. That film, a masterclass in narrative misdirection…
The most defining moment of Gwyneth Paltrow’s twenty-first-century public life did not take place on a Hollywood red carpet, nor did it occur during a…
The physical location of a runway often communicates as much as the garments traversing it. To witness models striding out onto the cantilevered “Floating Bridge”…
By Tessa Nolan “DC, Fairfax, wherever the f**k we are,” snarled Liam Gallagher, frontman of the British music group Oasis, as the final, swirling chords…
By Tessa Nolan If you listen closely to the stories cinema is telling us this year, you can hear a distinct and welcome sound: the…
There is a certain kind of light that exists only in the early hours of the morning, after a night of profoundly inadequate sleep. It…