John Semley
The end of Toronto’s first strip mall
To live in Toronto is, increasingly, to mourn places, including spots like Sunnybrook Plaza. For locals, these places become imbued with all kinds of personal memories and nostalgia.
Netflix’s secret weapon against Disney
John Semley: The entertainment giant wants to compete with Netflix. But the miracle-making streaming service knows what its customers want—even before they do.
The bizarre virtue—and the real problem—of the rise of Instagram-centric ‘exhibits’
Opinion: Candy-coloured photo-ops are masquerading as museum experiences—and they’re making an equivalence between Instagram content and contentment
Does the world still need Michael Moore?
With his new doc ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ taking aim at Donald Trump and the Democratic Party alike, the filmmaker proves as controversial—and frustrating—as ever
There’s a deep, dark joke at the heart of Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Who Is America?’
Sacha Baron Cohen’s new series cracks open a core illusion of American democracy—that it, and the ‘popular will,’ even exists at all
Borders of the mind: The privilege and politics of travelling to the U.S.-Mexico border
Essay: Walls are always first built in the imagination—and on a trip to Mexico through the U.S., John Semley finds a prescription for how they can be knocked down
‘Star Wars’ has a China problem—and it’s a symptom of Hollywood’s nostalgia addiction
‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ flopped in China, inviting us to imagine a nostalgia-free vacuum in which ‘Star Wars’ can be seen for what it really is
In blurring fact and fiction, ‘The Rider’ achieves truth and poetry
Chloé Zhao’s ‘The Rider’—a film about a Native American man on a reservation, made by a Chinese-American woman from the city—may be this year’s best American film
Has Donald Trump caused an existential crisis for political satire?
Armando Iannucci’s ‘Death of Stalin’ achieves the remarkable: hilariously skewering a murderous dictator. But even he thinks Trump may reveal comedy’s limits
After last year’s fiasco, the 2018 Oscars were a return to boring, trite form
The 2018 Oscars skated past and paved over its Best Picture mix-up last year—a reminder of its broader instinct toward conservatism
Our expectations of celebrities have changed. Can stars keep up?
Opinion: Award shows like the Oscars have become focal points for our instinct to seek moral leadership from celebs. But that’s backwards thinking.
There’s no country for old actors in Hollywood—and that matters
An Oscar nomination for Christopher Plummer, 88, stands out—and that ageism reveals something broader that #MeToo and #TimesUp should take note of