WIDE ANGLE

January 19, 2013 – Within less than 24 hours of the Sundance festival getting underway, people in Park City, Utah, were twerking, hookah-smoking, and hand-sanitizing (the last bit may have just been me in the wake of this flu epidemic).

January 17, 2013 – Last year, SPIN went to Sundance and heard no end about a movie that many reporters who descended on Park City, Utah, had missed, because it screened before the festival was fully underway: the tiny, beautiful, and wholly original Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was nominated for an Oscar for best picture last week, alongside films from Steven Spielberg and Kathryn Bigalow.

January 14, 2013 – Jesus, HBO makes January so much better. Sure, winter is coming, but Girls is here, and it's still one of the best shows on television, and definitely the best comedy, which might have sounded like biased love had not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association said the very same thing last night.

September 28, 2012 – If you don't recognize the name Rian Johnson and haven't heard it kicked around in discussions of young directors to watch, that is all about to change.

September 4, 2012 – Based on the previous performance of certain 21st century qualities dramas (The Wire, Battlestar: Galactica, The West Wing), you would be perfectly within your rights to worry that the fifth season of Breaking Bad would join their disappointing ranks. Sometimes the center just doesn't hold for longer than a Presidential term, if that. Fortunately, it very much did.

August 10, 2012 – Full-contact comedian Eric Andre might be the most post-everything funnyman in history. By combining the home-brewed humanity of Fernwood 2 Night, the surrealist Möbius strips of Tim & Eric, the Dada puckishness of Tom Green and the kinetic pranksterism of Jackass, he's ultimately an Andy Kaufman for the Four Loko generation.