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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Some films impart a message that lasts, especially if they offer another way to see the world. The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What is a movie that changed your mind?

The following contains spoilers for the films mentioned.

Priscilla (streaming on Max)

Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film about Priscilla Beaulieu’s relationship with Elvis Presley, is terrific to look at but hard to watch. Priscilla is 14 when she meets an already famous 24-year-old Elvis. While still a teenager, she moves with her future husband to Graceland, where she wears sophisticated clothes and sits in plush rooms. As the film critic Anthony Lane wrote in a New Yorker review, to call the movie superficial, “even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject.”

Priscilla is a revisionist project: It aims to tell the other side of Elvis’s story, to convey another perspective on a beloved cultural figure whose life has been the subject of countless books and biopics. So I wasn’t surprised that I left the theater unsettled, with a darker view of this artist whose songs I’d sung in elementary-school revues and whose home I’d visited on a high-school-band trip. But beyond the straightforward record-correcting objective of the movie (which is inspired by Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me), Coppola’s choice to end the film on a stark, ambiguous note reminded me that an abrupt conclusion can be as satisfying as a tidy one. That, in a movie concerned with the way things seem, feels true to life.

— Lora Kelley, associate editor

***

The Death of Stalin (streaming on Pluto TV)

Totalitarianism, when it’s not terrifying, can be absurd—the constant bowing to a Dear Leader, the seemingly arbitrary list of enemies and outlawed ideas that change every hour, the silly pomp of statues and parading armies. It’s almost impossible to capture the humor without undermining the horror. But The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s 2017 satire, brilliantly reveals the ridiculous side of authoritarian rule, and it opened my eyes to the small, shuffling, utterly banal individuals who undergird even the scariest systems.

Iannucci makes little effort at historical accuracy—I mean, Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev—but he gets at deeper truths. The story takes place following the sudden death of the titular dictator. The power vacuum that opens is filled with scheming and backstabbing politicians, including Khrushchev, Lavrentiy Beria, and Georgy Malenkov. But Iannucci mines it all for laughs, and they are plentiful. The pettiness, the servility, the insecurity of these men are all on display as they spin around Stalin’s corpse. And watching this transfer of power reduced to a bizarre human drama reminds you about what makes tyranny possible: very ordinary people.

— Gal Beckerman, staff writer

***

Rivers and Tides (streaming on Tubi)

When a friend first showed me Rivers and Tides, I had never heard of Andy Goldsworthy, and I had surely never seen anyone do what he did. The documentary follows the British artist through fields, forests, and tidelands as he creates sculptures and ephemeral works from materials he finds, often challenging our assumptions of what those materials, and their environments, even are. One frigid morning, we observe Goldsworthy snapping icicles apart, and whittling them with his teeth, to reconstruct them into a fluid form that seems to cut back and forth through a boulder; when the rising sun finally hits the sculpture, it’s spectacular. Another day, we see him collect fallen autumn leaves and arrange them over a pool of water into a surreal graphic gradient. Witnessing his way of seeing and collaborating with the world around him transformed me. I haven’t looked at a leaf—or twigs, or snow, or even stone—the same since.

— Kelsey J. Waite, senior copy editor

***

The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on FuboTV and Prime Video)

The Devil Wears Prada came out in June 2006, the same month I graduated from college. I saw it in a movie theater a few weeks into my first full-time job, and it was a revelation to watch its portrayal of the compromises, disappointments, and small victories that come with pursuing a career. The Devil Wears Prada is heightened and fantastical and unbelievable in all sorts of ways: The protagonist, Andy (the role that made me love Anne Hathaway forever), wears over-the-top clothes in an impossibly sleek office and kisses a suave older man on a lamp-lit Paris street. But the film is remarkably realistic and perceptive about work. Andy makes professional choices that alienate her from her parents, her friends, and her boyfriend. Even she doesn’t seem to fully understand why she is so determined to succeed at a job she never wanted in the first place. The film ends with her throwing her phone into a fountain and taking a job that more clearly aligns with her values and goals. But what’s stuck with me are the scenes where she is trying as hard as she can to prove to her boss, and to herself, that she can do anything that’s asked of her. Her ambition is remarkable—and it’s served as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale to me in the many years since.

— Eleanor Barkhorn, senior editor

***

Anora (available to rent on YouTube, streaming on Hulu March 17)

Of all the sex workers depicted in films, the titular protagonist of Anora—a movie that deserves at least three of its five Oscars—might be one of the few who actually feels like a worker.

At the strip club, Anora has shifts, a boss, and a mean colleague. Although sex work is technically illegal (albeit somewhat decriminalized) in New York City, she seems to have a somewhat normal job—until one night, when she gets close to Vanya, a new client. The story progresses like “Cinderella,” except the prince is the mediocre son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya marries Anora and gives her a taste of his opulent life. But when Vanya’s parents find out about the marriage, the love story is over.

Before watching Anora, I’d imagined that if work conditions improved for sex workers, they would be treated humanely. But Anora showed me—or perhaps reminded me—that society’s contempt for women in this industry is profound, and that better policies, important as they are, might never change that.

The beauty of Anora is that it never occurs to her that she is less-than. That a scion of the Russian oligarchy was never going to stay married to her seemed obvious to all of the characters—and perhaps also to the audience—but not to her. Anora screams and fights back, but even she has a limit to the amount of humiliation she can take. At the end of the movie, unable to continue holding her head high, she collapses into tears.

— Gisela Salim-Peyer, associate editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage. Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain.

The Week Ahead

Snow White, a live-action remake starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot (in theaters Friday) The Residence, a murder-mystery show about an eccentric detective who must solve a murder at a White House dinner (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Red Scare, a book by Clay Risen about McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch hunt (out Tuesday)

Essay

Pierre Crom / Getty

My Hometown Became a Different Country

By Tetiana Kotelnykova

Horlivka had always been a Russian-speaking city, but before 2014, our graduation ceremonies and school concerts were held in Ukrainian. We would sing the Ukrainian national anthem at the end of every event. Then, suddenly, the Ukrainian flags were taken down. The anthem was no longer sung. The Ukrainian language vanished from classrooms. The disappearance was so abrupt and absolute that it felt unreal, like a dream whose meaning was obscure to me. I remember asking my teacher why everything had altered so drastically. She didn’t have an answer—or maybe she was just too afraid to say.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Bong Joon Ho will always root for the losers. The man who owned 181 Renoirs Megan Garber: “I can’t stop talking about The Traitors.” An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery There’s nothing else like Netflix’s Mo. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run. Don’t invite a recession in.

Photo Album

A cheerleader entertains the crowd during the annual Moomba Festival, in Melbourne, Australia. (William West / AFP / Getty)

Take a look at these photos of the week, which show a cheerleader in Australia, a train-pulling record attempt in Egypt, Holi celebrations in India, and more.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.

Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The telepathy trap

America’s cultural revolution

Trump is breaking the fourth wall.

The Culture Survey: Shane Harris

The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]

If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.

Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.

Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.

The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.

That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.

The Week Ahead

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)

Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

By Shayla Love

What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Cling to your disgust.

When a celebrity offers a “harsh reality check”

The nicest swamp on the internet

“Dear James”: My husband is a mess.

Coaching is the new “asking your friends for help.”

A thriller that’s most fun when it’s boring

Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Mitch McConnell and the president he calls “despicable”

Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet

Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post

Photo Album

Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.

Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In today’s reading list, spend time with our writers’ takes on some of the buzziest movies of the past year.

How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days

The star of the year’s most nominated film torpedoed her chance to win the trophy—in audacious fashion.

By Shirley Li

Is Anyone Shocked by Babygirl?

Don’t turn to Nicole Kidman for a frank accounting of what sexual domination looks like.

By Caitlin Flanagan

The Oscars Have Left the Mainstream Moviegoer Behind

The Academy found its nominees on the international film-festival circuit, not at the movie theater.

By David Sims

The Movie That Mattered Most in 2024

Blink Twice anticipated the culture shift that defined the year.

By Sophie Gilbert

The Failed Promise of the New Captain America

The first intriguing Marvel sequel in years quickly wastes its potential.

By David Sims

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

The hollowness at the center of Heretic

By McKay Coppins

The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart

The Substance is one of several recent movies that scrutinize older female performers’ struggle to stay relevant.

By Shirley Li

The Week Ahead

The 97th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien (streaming tonight on Hulu)

Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi-comedy film about a disposable space worker who dies and regenerates to help colonize an ice world (in theaters Friday)

Daredevil: Born Again, a Marvel action series about a blind lawyer who fights crime (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Grad School Is in Trouble

By Ian Bogost

Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “I loved them. It was amazing,” she told me by phone while on a walk with her Australian shepherd. But the email that arrived from UW shortly after she got home was not the acceptance letter that she’d hoped for. Nor was it even a rejection. Instead, it said that she’d been placed in grad-school purgatory.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win. There was never a movie star like Gene Hackman. America now has a minister of culture. Six older books that deserve to be popular today Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Did Russia invade Ukraine? Is Putin a dictator? We asked every Republican member of Congress. Why MAGA likes Andrew Tate The Putinization of America

Photo Album

A diver explores an underwater cave in the Yucatán Peninsula. (Alvaro Herrero [Mekan] / UPY2025)

Take a look at the winning entries in this year’s Underwater Photographer of the Year contest.