Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: 'Sirāt,' 'Wizard of the Kremlin,' Alan Moore, More

What I've Been Into...

"Sirāt" (2025) This is a beautiful, mysterious and haunting film that comes on as a thriller but ends up being an exploration of faith. I've seen nothing like it.

The story follows Luis and his young son, Esteban, who are trying track down Luis' daughter who's gone missing amidst a community of ravers holding traveling parties in the Moroccan desert. Nobody's seen her, but Luis and Esteban tag along nevertheless, hoping against hope that she might turn up. They are seduced by the communal lifestyle of the partiers and the ever-present techno beat that combined with the spare surroundings and heat compel one to dance and lose oneself in the music in a sort of trance.

Through radio broadcasts and dialogue, we get hints that all is not well in the outer world and the ravers are confronted by military troops who try to break up their party, but the roots and circumstance of the outer conflict aren't clear. We just now things are better further up the road in the desert, where the ravers can set up their speakers and start another party, gaining more followers.

But the pilgrimage has its dangers. Not everyone makes it and these perils take us, like the ravers, by shocking surprise. All one can do is roll with the changes and hope that things will get better.

"The Wizard of the Kremlin" (2026). Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Jude Law and Alicia Vikander star in an unfunny satire of our sister state in political corruption and ineptitude, the former Soviet Union.

Wright is an academic and journalist from the U.S. who tracks down a Russian political operative (Dano) who, in endless voiceovers, tells us about all the evil shit he's done in cahoots with the new regime, led by our president's best friend, Vladmir Putin (Law). Vikander is around to, I guess, represent a sort of moral compass that is consistently ignored.

Long, boring and, like I said, not funny, or even that disturbing, though it oughtta be. Maybe the failing state of our own failed state has left me jaded but, actually, I think it's just a bad movie, altough there are good folks in the cast. Law is decent as Putin but there's too much life and mischief in his eyes. The real Putin's eyes, like his heart and soul, are dead.

Reads

Alan Moore talks to Parade about "I Hear a New World," the new entry in his "Long London" series:

...the whole of the Long London series is about...where we are now, how did we get here, what is our problem, what underlying disaster has caused us to be in this condition, and what could we possibly do about it. Hopefully, I can manage to get this across in a series that ends in 1999 before this century starts, but I’m hoping to take a broader look at the picture and to recast our dilemma.

I think that it will probably seem very pessimistic with the ending that I’ve got planned, but I promise you, that that is not how it is intended. It is the most optimistic that I can be about our current situation, which is that, yes, our world is ending, but I believe it has to. I always forget the name of the person who said this – I’m borrowing it from Slavoj Žižek, who had repeated it – “The new world cannot be born because the old world refuses to die.” I think that that, in a nutshell, is our dilemma. And hopefully if readers stick with me to the end of this unlikely and sometimes sordid London fantasy, then I hope that that is the message [they can take away from the books]. It is about the death of an old world and the possible beginnings of a new one.

Garry Trudeau writes about Charles Schulz and Snoopy in Rolling Stone:

Since no one could hear his thoughts, Snoopy was never at risk of being ridiculed as mercilessly as the rest of the Peanuts gang. He could pantomime his reveries to his heart’s content, and when the kids noticed him at all, they judged his behavior bizarre but harmless. Not that he paid no internal price: The adventures of his alter egos were often as disastrous as those of the strip’s humans. Schulz famously believed there was no humor to be found in winning. The World War I Flying Ace never won a dogfight with the Red Baron, the World-Famous Attorney lost every case, and the World-Famous Author foundered in a sea of rejection slips.