What to watch, read, and listen to this weekend

The show to watch

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

“In The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino moves past her insular small-town frames; those previous efforts are like the summer stock set pieces to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Broadway run. The new show is on a much larger scale—New York—and its protagonist Midge Maisel’s simple at-first-glance story quickly expands into its ambitious setting… The protagonist herself expands as well. Continuing Sherman-Palladino’s penchant for fast-talking, strong-minded female leads, Rachel Brosnahan commands attention almost instantly as Midge—as she’s intended to—making a toast at her own wedding, describing her storybook past with new husband, Joel.”
Read the rest of our review here.

The movie to see

Coco

“At a glance, this musical fantasy of departed family members peering back on our world seems like an oversweet interpretation of Pixar’s sentimental themes, not to mention the perfectionist animation studio’s preoccupation with memory. (See: Inside Out, Finding Dory.) But Coco teaches a salient point: In the dead, we see ourselves. Their world bears more than a passing resemblance to ours—and to the plight of families separated by borders—because our anxieties about death mirror our worries about own lives. It’s one of a handful of challenging ideas articulated in a film that is, paradoxically, one of Pixar’s less challenging high-concept creations—a somewhat formulaic, busily animated adventure with a relentlessly tearjerking finale and a structure that brings to mind Disney’s renaissance period.”
Read the rest of our review here.

The comic to read

Michel Fiffe, Zegas

“Comics are a two-dimensional medium, but within a page’s vertical and horizontal confines is a three-dimensional space that can be manipulated by visual storytellers. Not the depth within individual images, but the space surrounding the panels, which can have multiple planes depending on how those panels are arranged. Michel Fiffe is a cartoonist committed to exploring this aspect of the page, constantly finding innovative ways to depict visual information. The new Fantagraphics graphic novel, Zegas, collects comics originally self-published by Fiffe from 2009 to 2012, and these short stories about siblings Boston and Emily Zegas show Fiffe discovering new narrative possibilities telling grounded, character-driven stories with a boundary-pushing point of view.”
Read the rest of our review here.

The album to listen to

Miguel, War & Leisure

“As ‘Sky Walker’ and the latinized G-funk of ‘Caramelo Duro’ show… Miguel is still a phenomenally creative songwriter and producer, and his success here is partly owing to the way he allows his songs’ moving parts to wander around the party and mingle for a while before he passes them all off in search of something fresh. As he does with his assortment of expensive-looking robes, Miguel wears War & Leisure’s looseness well, and even if he doesn’t reveal much of himself, he still has the charisma to pull the whole ensemble off.”
Read the rest of our review here.