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This weekend, after Israel and the United States assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian government promised vengeance, swearing to “strike you with such painful blows that you will beg for mercy.” Across the Middle East, a network of Iranian allies known as the Axis of Resistance went on notice. The paramilitary group Hezbollah was the first to act—despite pleas from the Lebanese government to stay out of the war. Hezbollah had been quiescent since November, 2024, when it agreed to a ceasefire with Israel that ended a vicious fourteen-month conflict; during the ceasefire, Hezbollah had carried out one attack, while Israel had sent thousands of drones over the border and launched near-daily strikes that killed more than three hundred and fifty Lebanese, including children. On Sunday, at around midnight Beirut time, Hezbollah sent what it described as a “barrage of precision missiles and a swarm of drones” toward an Israeli missile-defense site south of Haifa. The projectiles failed to reach their target, but the Israeli military struck back fiercely. After issuing evacuation notices for fifty-three towns in southern Lebanon, it pummelled targets from the border to the southern suburbs of Beirut. By daybreak, the death toll was at least thirty-one.

In Beirut, a familiar, traumatic routine set in. Schools closed, and an exodus of people fleeing the attacks jammed the streets with traffic, trapping drivers for hours. Apartment buildings were felled by air strikes, and smoke billowed from the blasts; the buzz of Israeli drones filled the air. But there were crucial differences. The previous war had been initiated by Hezbollah in solidarity with the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. This time, many Lebanese were less willing to accept Hezbollah’s decision to engage Israel. And, this time, the Lebanese government openly turned on Hezbollah.

On Monday, after an emergency cabinet session, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, visibly irate, told reporters that Hezbollah had mounted its attack in defiance of “the majority of the Lebanese.” The cabinet adopted a stricture “prohibiting any military or security activity by Hezbollah, deeming them illegal and obligating the party to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state.” Security forces were ordered to apprehend anyone who attempted military activities from southern Lebanon. The country’s President, General Joseph Aoun, added that Hezbollah had given Israel “an excuse” to attack Lebanon, saying, “Those who launched the rockets bear sole responsibility.” Even Hezbollah’s closest ally, the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, supported the cabinet’s decisions.

Mohammad Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, responded that evening. The Lebanese, he claimed, “were expecting a resolution to prohibit aggression, but instead are faced with a resolution prohibiting resistance to aggression.” He argued that, given the state’s “impotence” against Israeli incursions, there was “no justification” for censuring Hezbollah, and he warned the government against “creating additional problems that would fuel the state of boiling tension.”

In Beirut, questions swirled: Could the state enforce a ban on Hezbollah’s armed wing without bloodshed? Had Hezbollah squandered the last of its political capital? Observers suggest a few plausible scenarios. There could be an explosive domestic confrontation between Hezbollah and the state’s security forces. Or Hezbollah could wait for parliamentary elections, scheduled for May, in the hope that more sympathetic leaders will be voted in (although the President described the ban on Hezbollah’s military activities as irreversible, and elections may be delayed). Or the government might set aside its differences with Hezbollah as Israel intensifies its campaign in Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Israeli ground troops stormed across the border. (Israeli forces already occupy five positions captured during the previous war, in addition to other southern territory that they have held for decades.) The Lebanese Army, which is supplied by the U.S., is not authorized to engage Israel except in self-defense; it withdrew some troops from the area. The next day, Israel issued evacuation orders for dozens of villages south of the Litani River, an area extending some thirty kilometres from the border. On Thursday, it followed up with an unprecedented evacuation notice for Beirut’s southern suburbs, a densely populated area home to hundreds of thousands of people. (Prior notices have indicated specific structures, not entire areas.) As drones circled overhead, messages spread on WhatsApp, warning people to open their windows so that they wouldn’t be shattered by blasts. The city fell into mayhem as panicked residents fled. Hours later, another forced-evacuation order was issued, for several towns in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. More than ninety thousand Lebanese have already been displaced. At least a hundred have been killed.

The Lebanese front is bleeding into a larger war across the Middle East. After the U.S. and Israel hammered Iranian nuclear sites last June, Iran offered a performative response: it struck U.S. bases only after providing enough warning for them to be evacuated first. This time, Iran has said that there are “no red lines.” Although many Iranian leaders have been killed, the regime remains intact, with no visible defections. The assassination of Khamenei, an octogenarian whose ideology considers martyrdom a religious reward, has galvanized his supporters. Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said that his country will not negotiate. Tehran began retaliating against Israel and the U.S., striking bases and installations in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, and elsewhere. The U.S. Embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were struck by drones. So was the consulate in Dubai. Air-raid sirens are blaring across the region.

Though Hezbollah is battered after the previous war with Israel, it remains the vanguard of an Axis of Resistance that includes Yemen’s Houthis, Palestinian groups, and numerous Iraqi militias. An Iraqi militia commander who recently attended meetings in Tehran told me that the Iranians were ready for a “very long war,” which they had “calmly and extensively prepared” for. In recent days, some of Iraq’s armed factions have launched attacks on U.S. interests—in Iraq and, the groups claim, in Kuwait and Jordan. The militias have sustained casualties in counterattacks. Like other Axis forces, many of the Iraqi militias have been weakened since the war in Gaza began, but the commander told me that the “circle of resistance” was expanding with each new escalation.

The Iraqi state is proceeding carefully. It has condemned the attacks on Iran and on Iraqi militias; at the same time, it has asked armed factions in Iraq to refrain from strikes without orders from the state. Baghdad fears that instability in Iran, one of its largest trading partners, will have devastating economic effects. Iran has already effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz—a major conduit for shipments of oil, which funds most of Iraq’s national budget. Yemen’s Houthis also retain the ability to resume their siege on shipping in the Red Sea. Oil prices and shipping costs are rising.

Iran faces what is widely considered the strongest military in the world, alongside Israel’s technologically advanced forces; France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have indicated that they may join the campaign, too. But small, agile forces can still inflict harm, particularly in battles that they consider existential. Tehran’s strikes are already draining Washington’s supply of air-defense interceptors. On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, lamented that, in a month, Iran can produce more than a hundred ballistic missiles and field thousands of drones; in the same time, the U.S. can deliver only six or seven interceptor units.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah amplified its campaign, launching drones and rockets at military sites in Israel and at Israeli Merkava tanks that had entered Lebanon. It also said that it had downed a drone. Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, announced that he’d ordered his military to seize additional positions in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday night, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, made his first televised remarks since the front reopened. He said that Hezbollah’s weapons weren’t up for debate. He urged the Lebanese people “not to stab the resistance in the back during a period of confrontation and war” but to instead unite and “prioritize confronting this enemy. After that, we can debate our other issues.”

As Hezbollah engages in a new war, the question of its motivations is crucial. Why react to Khamenei’s death and not to the many Israeli attacks during the ceasefire—especially now that there is a huge U.S. military force deployed to the region? Qassem, in his speech, claimed that Hezbollah had preëmpted an Israeli escalation. “Read the Israeli media and the statements of some officials,” he said. “They prepared for this aggression. They identified the targets and called up a hundred thousand reservists.” (The Israel Defense Forces has said that its preparations were defensive.)

Amal Saad, a Hezbollah expert and a lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University, argued on social media that Hezbollah’s decision was not a gamble, because “a gamble presupposes something of value left to lose.” Given Israel’s violations of the ceasefire and a Lebanese government that the party sees as “collaborationist,” Hezbollah was faced with the choice to either fight back or face “slow annihilation.”

Saad, reached by phone in London, acknowledged that Hezbollah’s supporters would bear the brunt of its reëngagement, but she said that they had also suffered during the ceasefire, as residents of border villages were unable to return and rebuild. The question wasn’t whether there would be “war or no war,” Saad told me, but whether the war would be fought on Hezbollah’s terms or on Israel’s. “What the community appears to be demanding is a commitment that this intervention will be consequential enough to justify the costs that it will inevitably extract,” she said.

Saad proposed that Hezbollah had two reasons to reëngage now. Having restrained itself while Israel attacked during the ceasefire, Hezbollah could say that it had given Beirut’s diplomacy a chance. More significantly, she said, “acting during the ceasefire violations would have meant fighting alone, on unfavorable terms, without the regional cover the Iran war now provides and the possibility of a more durable and favorable ceasefire agreement.”

The Axis of Resistance, she explained, had adopted a “decentralized mosaic defense,” which suggested that “Hezbollah’s military operations are not part of a joint-operations room” with other Axis factions “but are being conducted autonomously on the operational level—though aligned strategically with Iran in terms of timing and, likely, pre-agreed escalation ladders.” The key question, Saad said, “was how far the U.S. and Israel are willing to push in response, and whether they have correctly read the threshold beyond which the Axis, and particularly Hezbollah, was always going to conclude it had nothing left to lose.” ♦

On April 22, 1793, President George Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality in the war that had just been declared between France and Britain. The United States, Washington decreed, “should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers.” Washington’s action raised a question: Where did the President get off declaring the country’s neutrality? After all, the Constitution, which had been written merely six years earlier, entrusted to Congress the power to declare war. Didn’t Washington’s actions infringe on that authority? The dispute generated an exchange over the proper scope of Presidential power, conducted in the pages of a Philadelphia newspaper, between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Hamilton, writing as Pacificus, reaffirmed his typically muscular reading of executive authority. A “correct and well informed mind will discern at once,” he asserted, that such discretion “of course must belong to the Executive.” After all, he continued, “The general doctrine then of our constitution is, that the Executive Power of the Nation is vested in the President; subject only to the exceptions and qu[a]lifications which are expressed in the instrument.”

Madison pushed back, under the pen name Helvidius, after the Roman statesman who argued that the emperor should act only with the consent of the Senate. His concern extended beyond the precise question of the neutrality proclamation; Madison offered a more general admonition against bestowing war powers on a single, potentially flawed individual. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department,” Madison, the primary author of the document, observed. Were that decision placed in the hands of the executive, he warned, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man”—not, perhaps, “the prodigy of many centuries” but a more imperfect leader, “such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy.” The reason, Madison said, was clear: “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. . . . In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

To read those words today, in light of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, is to shudder. First, of course, at Madison’s prescience: like the other Founders, he grasped the frailty of human nature and the consequent imperative of checks and balances. Second, however, at the chasm between the Framers’ conceptions of Presidential war power and the unbounded nature of that authority today. Even Hamilton took it as a given that the decision about whether to go to war was wisely lodged in Congress, as the Constitution had provided. “If the Legislature have a right to make war on the one hand—it is on the other the duty of the Executive to preserve Peace till war is declared,” he wrote. Hamilton and Madison would have been aligned in horrified opposition had Washington, without congressional action, dispatched gunboats to sink British ships.

But here we are, in a world of congressional atrophy and seemingly unlimited Presidential war-making power. This lopsided situation is not solely of Trump’s making. Congress has not formally declared war since the Second World War, as the executive branch, under Presidents of both parties, has asserted ever-increasing authority to engage in the unilateral use of military force. Since that time, congressional acquiescence has generally taken the form of an authorization for the use of military force—when it has happened at all. To a certain extent, this is a logical and necessary outgrowth of technological innovations, and of the need for speed and flexibility in an age of nuclear weapons and global terrorism. The congressional power to declare war, like the rest of the Constitution, is not, to paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, a suicide pact. Indeed, the Framers recognized these imperatives, along with the tension inherent between congressional authority and the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief. At the Constitutional Convention, they rewrote the draft language of the document, which originally assigned Congress the power to “make war.” According to Madison’s notes, “make” was changed to “declare,” “leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks.”

Decade after decade, the modern Congress has allowed its authority to be eroded, with only tiny and largely ineffective peeps of protest. In 1989, after the Panamanian General Manuel Noriega refused to honor election results, President George H. W. Bush ordered thousands of troops to Panama to, among other things, capture Noriega to stand trial for drug trafficking in the United States. In 1999, President Bill Clinton instituted an air campaign, joined by NATO allies, to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; the operation continued beyond the sixty-day deadline to obtain congressional approval for introducing U.S. troops into hostilities imposed by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. In 2011, President Barack Obama launched missile attacks against military sites in Libya; Obama called the action “a limited and well-defined mission in support of international efforts to protect civilians and prevent a humanitarian disaster.” During Trump’s first term, he conducted air strikes against a Syrian airfield in 2017, and again in 2018 on chemical-weapons facilities, the second time joined by the United Kingdom and France. In 2021, President Joe Biden, invoking his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, ordered “defensive” air strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

These actions were typically abetted by legal opinions issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; each opinion built on its predecessor to justify increasingly elastic interpretations of Presidential power. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and a head of that office under President George W. Bush, has observed that the O.L.C. opinions on Presidential use of force “are famously promiscuously permissive.” The first part of O.L.C.’s analysis is whether the planned military activity furthers a “sufficiently important national interest.” Somehow, it always does. The second part is whether the “nature, scope and duration” of the expected use of force rises to the level of “ ‘war’ in a constitutional sense.” Somehow, it never does.

In considering whether military action amounts to a war, the O.L.C.’s lawyers examine factors such as whether there will be ground troops, the likely number of casualties, the scope of the mission (for instance, targeted strikes versus regime change), and the risk of escalation. As a report by the Congressional Research Service summarized, “The executive branch has never publicly concluded that a military operation crossed the threshold into an unconstitutional war, but it has opined that a variety of military operations do not reach this level. For example, O.L.C. concluded that deployments of 20,000 ground forces, a two-week air campaign including 2,300 combat missions, and an air campaign involving over 600 missiles and precision-guided munitions did not amount to wars in the constitutional sense.” Adding insult to congressional injury, “even when Congress enacted authorizations for use of military force—including in the Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War of 1991, post-September 11 conflict of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War—each Presidential Administration claimed that they possessed independent constitutional authority to engage in those conflicts even if Congress had not authorized them.” When Trump, in 2020, ordered the targeted killing of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani while Soleimani was on a trip to Baghdad, the O.L.C. stretched the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq to justify the killing of the Iranian leader. The O.L.C.’s interpretations are also, for the most part, unchallengeable. Since at least the war in Vietnam, courts have refused to referee disputes between the President and Congress over war powers.

In other words, Trump took office for the second time with few significant constraints on his power to deploy the military. Then, typically, he blew through whatever limits remained. The first strike on Iran, in June, 2025, stretched the limits of his authority because of the risk it posed of setting off a regional conflict. The January, 2026, operation to seize the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, pressed the limits even further; the closest analogy is the George H. W. Bush Administration’s capture of Noriega, but, in that case, Panama’s Defense Forces had killed a U.S. marine, and its National Assembly had declared a state of war with the United States. The current war with Iran—as Trump himself has described it—represents an even greater leap into a realm of unchecked Presidential power. If there is any practical restraint on unilateral Presidential action, it is hard to discern. The Framers would have found this chilling.

I spoke about the Iran war recently with Tess Bridgeman, who was a deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama Administration; she is now a senior fellow and visiting scholar at N.Y.U. Law School’s Reiss Center on Law and Security and co-editor-in-chief of the website Just Security. Bridgeman told me that, prior to the Trump Administration, “this would have been one of the paradigmatic cases of, Of course you have to go to Congress.” Under previous Presidents, she said, “the separation of powers has been eroded. This is it being eviscerated.”

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 states that, within forty-eight hours of troops being introduced into hostilities, the President must inform Congress. The Trump Administration did so on Monday, asserting that the “strikes were undertaken to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests . . . and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” The law gives Congress the ability—in theory, anyway—to halt military action. In practice, this is doomed to failure in the current Congress; any resolution would have to survive an almost certain Presidential veto. Still, Congress taking a vote is important as a matter of symbolism and, not incidentally, politics. As Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat who has been a stalwart defender of congressional prerogatives, put it, “Nobody gets to hide and give the President an easy pass or an end run around the Constitution. Everybody’s got to declare whether they’re for this war or against it.” In an effort to stop military action in Iran, Kaine, alongside the Republican senator Rand Paul, put forward a new war-powers resolution that has not been approved by Congress; it failed in the Senate on Wednesday, by a vote of 47–53; the House is expected to take up a similar measure on Thursday, with the same outcome expected.

In the meantime, the war shows every sign of widening. On Tuesday, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka, more than two thousand miles from Iran; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that it was the first such action since the Second World War. Hegseth vowed “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and said that the conflict had “only just begun.” If this is not “war in a constitutional sense,” nothing is. ♦

Like “Lolita,” the new campus comedy “Vladimir” takes its title from the object of its protagonist’s delusional obsession. The series’ Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall, is a rising literary star and a young father who’s just arrived at a sleepy upstate college, where he and his wife are set to teach. More relevant to his new colleague, M (Rachel Weisz), a creative-writing professor, he is also fantastically hard-bodied, as dedicated to his gains at the gym as he is to the life of the mind. M’s infatuation with Vladimir might be interpreted as an idle distraction from the sex scandal engulfing her husband, John (John Slattery), if not for a flash-forward in the show’s opening minutes. There she is with an unconscious man tied to a chair in her cabin, part-Humbert Humbert, part-Annie Wilkes.

The initial scene inspires little faith. M looks into the camera and addresses the viewer directly, bemoaning the woes of middle age. Her adult daughter no longer needs her. Her students find her lectures passé. Worst of all, she may never again provoke a “spontaneous erection” since, “as an older woman—truly, what is more embarrassing—I will have lost the ability to captivate.” Coming from someone who looks like Rachel Weisz, one of the most gorgeous women alive, such sentiments are a little hard to swallow. Being taken into M’s confidence feels like being cornered at a party by the least self-aware person in the room. Later, she remarks that the scope of her Women in American Fiction class is “a bit broad,” then adds, lest we miss her brilliant wit, “that was a pun.”

Despite this unpromising start, “Vladimir”—adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by its author, Julia May Jonas, and the showrunner Kate Robin—proves strangely compelling. Even when we think we know where the series is going, it remains as slippery as its unreliable narrator, difficult to nail down in both genre and intent. Much of the early fun lies in the gap between how M thinks she comes across and how she actually does. In the pilot, she crows about the harvest salad she brings to a faculty retreat—a “real fuck-you salad,” she intimates to us, “the kind that makes everyone a bit embarrassed about what they brought.” It’s beautiful, but it goes untouched. When her “best and favorite” student opts to take a course with Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), in lieu of M’s own, she assures the girl that Women in American Fiction is oversubscribed anyway. The numbers say otherwise.

“Vladimir” is about as invested in the mores of the university as “The Morning Show” is in the mechanics of the newsroom. The adaptation retains traces of its literary roots—there are multiple nods to Nabokov, including a bakery named after Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother—but its bookishness is mostly window dressing. The show’s depiction of the ivory tower is full of improbable dramas: one subplot involves a texted request for a letter of recommendation sent at 11 P.M. and fulfilled within the hour. M struggles with an unshakable case of writer’s block that set in fifteen years ago, after the publication of her acclaimed first novel. Vladimir, who’s working on his sophomore effort, is more dismayed than soothed when she says of tenure, “Once you get it, you never have to go anywhere else.”

M isn’t just a creature of the academy, but its happy captive. While her husband charms their daughter and her partner by holding forth on the Kardashians as the Greek tragedies of our times, M would probably be content forever teaching “Rebecca”—a text that one of her students declares unrelatable because it features “a mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.” (To her credit, M mounts a persuasive defense of the book’s universality as a story about “the inescapable pull of your lover’s lover.”) Her fear that her professional irrelevance has come too soon—an anxiety not often explored in Hollywood’s midlife-crisis narratives—is unexpectedly affecting.

That feeling of obsolescence comes to a head when a half-dozen former students lodge complaints of inappropriate behavior against John. M’s adoring acolytes reassure her that she doesn’t “have to do the whole supportive-wife thing”—but, once she declines to distance herself from him, she begins to be seen as complicit herself. The series is largely sympathetic to M’s nostalgia for an era when affairs between teachers and students were “fun not despite the power dynamic, but because of the power dynamic,” and her pupils are believably overbearing in their certainty that rigid moral frameworks can be applied to any relationship. They also exhibit a boner-killing tendency to label every impulse with hyper-specific jargon; one boy asks for an extension on a paper because he was busy coming out as “gynesexual,” or attracted to femininity in any gender. (M would prefer not to overanalyze pleasure: she and John have enjoyed what she calls “an open marriage, but without all the awful communication.”) While she decries the way today’s young women seem to deny their own sexual agency, she’s desperate to assert her own. When Vladimir confesses that he and his wife have had a fight, she looks downright hopeful as she asks, “About me?”

The series follows M down this rabbit hole, less interested in relitigating the #MeToo movement than in showing what happens when a woman’s lust becomes an imperfect vehicle for self-renewal. At first, it’s easier to fantasize about Vladimir in hackneyed, uncomplicated erotic scenarios than to confront her domestic reality, which bristles with decades of pent-up resentments. But when Vladimir divulges Cynthia’s history of depression or overburdens her with child care, you start to wonder if M just has a thing for assholes. At least John—who strongly recalls Roger Sterling, Slattery’s “Mad Men” character—boasts a roguish charisma; Vladimir is such a drip that even his wife muses aloud that he could benefit from the life experience of having an affair.

That Vladimir never deserves M’s admiration is beside the point. It’s desire itself that resuscitates her, even when wanting someone so badly makes humiliation unavoidable. M inadvertently drops hints that she thinks about Vladimir constantly; when he texts her an emoji, she has to ask her daughter what it means. But he’s less important as a lover than as a muse. After meeting him, M begins to write again—though, because the show seldom shies from absurdity, she pens the entire manuscript by hand, filling dozens of legal pads. Fittingly, she takes them to bed: in the end, she’s most intoxicated by her own thoughts. ♦

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On this episode of Critics at Large, with the ninety-eighth Academy Awards just around the corner, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz are joined by their fellow staff writer Michael Schulman to take stock of Oscars season. They discuss the biggest races and consider whether the year’s Best Picture nominees—many of them both critical and commercial successes—might represent a return to the bygone era of “grownup movies.” At the center of all this pageantry is the host: a notoriously tricky role for even the most seasoned performers. Together, the critics revisit the highs and lows of Oscars hosting history, from the long tenure of Bob Hope to the golden age of Billy Crystal. These m.c.s’ success hinges on their ability to walk a fine line, embodying the celebratory spirit of the evening while also poking fun at its absurdity. “It’s about that insider-outsider aspect. You are the court jester,” Schwartz says. “Are you really wanting to be vizier to the king, or are you O.K. in that jester role?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Oscar Wars,” by Michael Schulman
“Marty Supreme” (2025)
“Sinners (2025)
“The Secret Agent” (2025)
“One Battle After Another” (2025)
“‘Come to Brazil?’ The Oscars Just Might,” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
“Sentimental Value” (2025)
“The Mastermind” (2025)
“Peter Hujar’s Day” (2025)
Billy Crystal’s opening monologue for the 1990 Oscars
Chris Rock’s opening monologue for the 2005 Oscars
Ricky Gervais’s opening monologue for the 2020 Golden Globes
Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue for the 2026 Golden Globes

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.