Full Coverage: Entertainment 2015: A year in review
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In a recent interview, Mike De Luca, the prominent producer of “The Social Network” and “Fifty Shades of Grey,” wondered aloud something that shocked me in its openness and introspection: “Do I seek out other white men?”
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Anyone who would say it was a weak year for movies wasn’t looking in the right places.
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It’s difficult to look at the news recently and not feel some complicated layering of disheartened and disgusted or to think the world is genuinely spinning out of control on some accelerated course to who-knows-where.
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Call 2015 the Choose Your Own Adventure year in music.
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We can never read enough.
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I’ve been making Google spreadsheets of my favorite albums and songs for years.
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The year had a beginning.
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Best of 2015: 10 best pop music albums in 2015 include works by Earl Sweatshirt, Jlin, Natalie Prass
Earl Sweatshirt, “I Don’t Like … I Don’t Go Outside” (Tan Cressida/Sony): A meditation on the life of a 21-year-old rapper who earned fame while he was still in high school, Earl Sweatshirt’s album rumbles with claustrophobic bass while midrange melodies and plunked piano tones guide tracks forward.
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Rhiannon Giddens, “Tomorrow Is My Turn” (Nonesuch): A tour de force by the lead singer of the Carolina Chocolate Drops in her solo debut.
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The Weeknd, “Beauty Behind the Madness” (XO/Republic): Pop cleanup jobs don’t come any more satisfying than this one by the once-shadowy R&B auteur, whose flashy new collaborators only make him seem more twisted.
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Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (TDE): Pulling from free jazz, Parliament-Funkadelic era funk, slam poetry and live instrumentation helped Lamar craft the year’s toughest listen.
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In a complex, often tragic year, jazz again proved itself an adept reflector and communicator, delivering messages of outrage, solace and hope while giving a voice to what lies beyond words.
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For a medium that for much of the last decade has been overrun with machismo, 2015 in video games represented a year of powerful role reversals.
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The top 10 video games of 2015, ranked below, include both the extremely personal and the return of a household name, Lara Croft.
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“Mad Men: The Complete Collection” (Lionsgate): Now that the final episode has aired, the complete run of Matthew Weiner’s period drama stands as one the great achievements in the history of TV: a set of poignant short stories, revolving around the 1960s advertising business, adding up to a grand statement about social and personal change.
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The story of home video in 2015 is the same as it’s been for much of the last few years: repackaging, repackaging, repackaging.
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Best of 2015: Celebrating the complexity of contemporary culture: David L. Ulin’s best books of 2015
Books are not supposed to be about the news — or so the conventional wisdom goes.
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Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction — the jury is still out on that one — but it’s certainly as alluring as fiction when it comes to the predilections of feature filmmakers.
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What should we think when an artist can make people buy almost 5 million copies of an album in two weeks?
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From the opening of high-profile new museums in the U.S. to cultural affirmation in Paris, these moments, for better or worse, helped to define culture in Los Angeles and the world in 2015.
