Bob Dylan is an enigma. Despite being a towering force of American culture, he has always defied easy interpretation, too slippery to fit into categories or expectations. So, do we really need a Bob Dylan musical biopic? The genre is synonymous with clichés and unoriginality — notoriously squeezing complex lives into generic, done-to-death narratives.
Hello and welcome to another week of media recommendations from the Arts and Entertainment section! As February begins, we hope you can find the time to enjoy some of these upcoming releases in the arts, from film and television to books, music to live events. As always, the full list is provided below, but here are my personal picks for new media to consume in the upcoming week.
The 2025 Oscar nominations are out, and, trust me, they did not disappoint. This year’s list of contenders is a cinematic fever dream of groundbreaking films, historic nominations and a little bit of controversy to keep things spicy. From Emilia Pérez making history, to Wicked bringing Broadway glam to the big screen and The Brutalist sparking debates about technology in film, it’s a lineup worth dissecting. So, let’s roll out the red carpet and break it all down.
Welcome back to the Art & Entertainment’s “To watch and watch for”: a weekly column where we inform you about upcoming film, TV, book and album releases, along with artistic performances happening in Baltimore! If you’ve been trying to widen your horizons in seeking new artistic releases, then you are in the right place.
On Jan. 1, American rapper and record producer Lupe Fiasco announced on Instagram that he will join the Peabody Institute’s faculty as a Distinguished Visiting Professor for the new Bachelor of Music in Hip Hop program. This new initiative from Peabody, starting in fall 2025, will include the first undergraduate performing hip hop degree ever to be offered in the United States.
The Booker Prize — as defined by the foundation of the same name — is “the leading literary award in the English speaking world,” and it’s awarded to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.” On Nov. 12 of this year, the Booker Prize was announced. It was presented to a novel lauded in a unanimous decision by the panel: a novel with “capaciousness and resonance,” one boasting “beauty and ambition.” That novel is Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a story tracking the lives of six astronauts as they hurtle through space for 16 days. Upon finishing the book, however, none of these descriptions came to mind.
Peabody Opera Theatre (POT) and Peabody Symphony Orchestra (PSO) presented four days of sublime opera from Thursday, Nov. 21 to Sunday, Nov. 24 in the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. The groups showcased L'enfant et les sortilèges and The Classical Style: An Opera (Of Sorts) which has music by Steven Stucky and libretto by Jeremy Denk. The casts alternate every other day, while musicians performed in every show. Differing from the usual concert set up in the hall, the musicians were all in the pit underneath the stage, leaving room for the performers to perform the opera on the stage above.
With Thanksgiving not far behind in the rear view mirror, Heretic is a movie that may feel familiar to many viewers — even if you aren’t one of two young Mormon girls spreading the Word to an older atheist man who traps you in his house, subjecting you to Saw-like games.
The Johns Hopkins Taskforce on the Arts is a group composed of 15 people with members ranging from faculty to students with an interest in the arts across the University's schools and programs. These different representatives are serving to help the Taskforce on the Arts understand what opportunities there are and what improvements could be made across the various arts programs and schools.
SLAM’s 16th Annual Benefit & Showcase gathered folks from Hopkins and Baltimore in Shriver Hall on the evening of Nov. 16 for a night filled with high-energy performances and stylish choreography. The event featured 12 student-led groups, from Hopkins, neighboring universities or the DMV area, and showcased each one’s passion for urban dance and free expression.
Is a text supposed to die? This is the question that probed my mind as I exited the Merrick Barn, where I attended the Johns Hopkins Theatre’s recent production of Christopher Chen’s Passage: a variation on E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. Despite having never read A Passage to India, my skeletal understanding of the novel’s plot is that it’s about the tension between Britain and India during the former’s colonial rule over the latter. This helped me identify the chief difference between Passage and its muse. The play never mentions “Britain” or “India”; instead, the places are named Country X and Country Y (with the occasional arbitrary allusion to Country Z).
In this revolving door of shifting relevancy and style biting, SahBabii has kept a steady popularity without changing himself completely. He is still trap’s most interesting side character: an amphibian-voiced crooner with a fixation on various animals and an insatiable freakiness only matched by Kevin Gates.
Rock, pop, metal, punk — all these and more were on show last week from Hopkins and Peabody’s student bands. Harnessing the power of live music to raise money, two fraternities threw a Battle of the Bands event and donated the proceeds to charity.
Bryson Tiller: a name synonymous with R&B, known for his hits such as “Don’t,” “Exchange” and “Whatever She Wants.” Tiller has nearly 22 million monthly listeners on Spotify, three Grammy Award nominations, multiple Billboard Music Award wins; and for only $15, any Hopkins student could see him up close during a campus concert on Nov. 9 hosted by Student Affairs.
Sharp angles. Bare sides. Flat features. Only lines. Am I talking about Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or about Elon Musk’s relatively new Cybertruck? If you weren’t sure either, maybe you’ve already made the connection that the Cybertruck is our modern version of cubist artwork. We’ve moved away from the canvas and oil paints and ventured into the world of stainless steel and armor glass.
The Peabody Concert Orchestra (PCO) displayed an exceptional performance on Saturday, Nov. 9 in the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. The excitement in the packed hall could be felt, especially as Dean of the Peabody Institute Fred Bronstein dedicated the opening of the annual PCO in memory of Steven Muller — former president of the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital — who passed away in 2013. The program notes describes him as — “a visionary leader who reshaped and reinvigorated JHU during his long tenure as president.”
Do you feel winter on its way yet? The Arts & Entertainment section is here with another list of media to make your next week a little more colorful. This week’s picks include a new book by Haruki Murakami, an alternative album, a fresh take on classical music, two blockbusters and a documentary.
If you could have everything you could ever dream of, you would probably grasp tightly onto this new reality. In Sean Baker’s Anora, a sex worker who goes by Ani becomes roped into a life of extravagance and grandeur after impulsively marrying the son of a Russian oligarch.
On Monday, Oct. 8, my First Year Seminar, Writing with Pictures: An Introduction to Writing Picture Books and Graphic Novels, was glad to welcome Elizabeth Lilly as a guest speaker. Lilly is a Baltimore local, a professor at MICA and Towson, and both an illustrator and a writer.
Hello everyone and welcome back to our “To watch and watch for” series, where the Arts & Entertainment section compiles a list of all the upcoming films, TV shows, books, albums and live events happening on campus, in the wider Baltimore area and beyond. I’m excited for this new format we started, because it means I get to share even more new releases. This week was extremely hefty in the musical department, with plenty of big names like Jon Batiste, Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige, and the list of live events continues to grow as we get further into the semester.
