1. This Awards Season, Fernanda Torres Is Taking a Bemused Victory Lap
Even in the worst aesthetic circumstances—perched precariously on the edge of her bed, self-lit, wired headphones in her ears, and coming off the back of “working like a mad dog”—Fernanda Torres lights up her Zoom window. Her eyes are deeply swimmable as she calls in from Lisbon (“my Shangri-la”), and her rather intoxicating mix of composure and enthusiasm is palpable through the pixels. The 59-year-old actor is a household name in her Brazilian motherland—she lives in Rio de Janeiro, where she was born. Rather late to the party, Hollywood is finally waking up to Torres’s nuanced, softly powerful screen presence.
2. A Thrilling Crop of New Galleries Is Popping Up in LA. Here Are 5 of the Most Promising.
LA's gallery landscape has long wrestled with the burden and blessing of being seen as slightly removed from the big-money art scenes of New York and London. Yet it’s exactly this distance that enabled the development of a curious, diverse, and now mature market whose range—from the mega-gallery to the midsize dealer to the upstart experiment—mirrors the variety of Los Angeles’s neighborhoods. CULTURED spoke with five young, taste-making galleries, all founded within the past five years, who are showing promising maturity and confidence as they establish themselves in LA’s increasingly crowded gallery market.
3. ‘The Penguin’ Star Cristin Milioti Shares the Biggest Misconception She Had About Acting
As an actor, adaptability—specifically, the ability to transition seamlessly from comedy to drama to musical theater—is Cristin Milioti’s defining feature. (Well, that and her big brown eyes, which serve as vessels of any feeling, big or small, that passes through her characters' minds.) The New Jersey-born performer is as comfortable getting laughs in a throwback sitcom like How I Met Your Mother as she is starring in an off-the-wall tech satire for HBO Max or playing a love-stricken lead in the Broadway musical Once. She has, as the kids say, range. Milioti’s latest project, The Penguin, a spin-off of the DC film The Batman, offered her the opportunity to explore a darker dimension.
Whether you’ve seen a Luca Guadagnino film or not, you’ve most likely experienced their aesthetic collateral. The prolific Italian director has permeated the zeitgeist with a slew of features mining feverish, tangled, and often queer desire. Last year alone, he released Challengers, which chronicles a love triangle between tennis stars, and Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novella, which follows an American expat as he falls for a much younger man in 1950s Mexico City. Now, he’s at work on six—yes, six—new projects, including a highly anticipated adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 serial-killer novel American Psycho. Here, he discusses the endless creative impulse with one of his favorite artists, experimental photographer Thomas Ruff.
5. Fashion Critics Vanessa Friedman, Tim Blanks, and Rachel Tashjian Debate the Future of Their Field
The businesses of fashion and media are uneasy bedfellows. Yet the two industries have never been more closely intertwined than they are today—and the fate of fashion criticism hangs uneasily in the balance. Sea changes in media make for a daunting vista: Fast fashion’s behemoth environmental impact, a dearth of representation (gender or otherwise) among high-profile creative directors, and the proliferation of self-styled tastemakers have monopolized online discourse. Where, in this thorny new landscape, does the role of the fashion critic lie? To answer this question, CULTURED convened three of today’s leading voices for a candid roundtable discussion.
6. Here Are the 9 New Books You Should Add to Your Reading List This Month
Looking through the longlist of soon-to-be-released books can be daunting. After all, sitting down with a tome is an investment of our most precious commodity: time. Ahead of the deluge of new releases this year, we combed through the catalogues for you, selecting the titles most worth your undivided attention. From murder mysteries to art historical reckonings, we have everything you need to keep your bookshelf properly stocked this month.
7. Meet Malcolm Peacock, the Winner of 'CULTURED' and MZ Wallace's $30,000 Young Artist Prize
Malcolm Peacock, a New York–based artist and athlete whose participatory work captivates audiences with piercing questions about intimacy, power, and loss, is the winner of the 2024 Young Artist Prize. Presented this year by CULTURED in partnership with MZ Wallace, the award offers $30,000 to a promising talent chosen from the magazine’s ninth annual Young Artists list. “Through his multidisciplinary practice, Malcolm’s powerful work proposes different ways of being in the world,” say Monica Zwirner and Lucy Wallace Eustice, MZ Wallace’s cofounders and codesigners.
Victoria Beckham is no stranger to reinvention—whether in music, fashion, or, more recently, the art world. Now, in her latest collaboration with Sotheby’s, she has transformed her Dover Street boutique into a striking gallery space, showcasing works by some of the art world’s biggest names—Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Keith Haring, and Yoshitomo Nara among them. "I’ve always wanted my store to be about more than just retail," she tells CULTURED. "In fact, I chose it because the space reminded me of a gallery."
9. How the Internet Fell for Marisa Abela’s Zillennial Take On the Femme Fatale
“Fucking made for each other,” Marisa Abela hisses to her co-stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender during a turning point in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Black Bag. The 28-year-old actor came to the project after an electrifying third season of Industry, the HBO show about the professional, emotional, and sexual machinations of ruthless and wounded entry-level investment bankers. She began filming the latest season only one week after wrapping Back to Black, the biopic focused on the early chapter of Amy Winehouse’s career. In many ways, Abela plays her characters like a dreamy brunette vixen of a different era: soft and sharp, striking and delicate. Her approach splices the qualities of a femme fatale with a 21st-century understanding of emotional intelligence.
10. Anora's Sean Baker on His Journey From Wedding Video Editor to Oscar-Nominated Director
Around 2000, just after Sean Baker got clean from opioids, he had to rebuild his life from scratch. He edited corporate videos; he duplicated VHS tapes for actors’ reels. And—whether you’re a palm reader or a lawyer or a filmmaker—there is always work in weddings. Most of the weddings he filmed were in ethnic enclaves of New York. One took place in Brighton Beach, where the Moscow satellite elitism and shitty weather stuck with him. It was an early seed for Anora, his latest movie, which was nominated for a whopping six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress in a Leading Role, along with six Film Independent Spirit Awards.
