Insert Foot has some suggestion for the Academy Awards. I was going to write something serious about the Oscars because I used to be a film writer and have many important opinions about things with which you should agree and we can all feel smart. Then I realized I…

Beyoncé performs on the opening night of the Renaissance World Tour in at Friends Arena in Stockholm, Sweden on May 10, 2023. Photo by Mason Poole. Beyoncé has the no. 1 country song on Billboard with “Texas Hold ‘Em.” That’s generating a lot of talk, most of it hysterical…

U2 performs at Sphere in Las Vegas on Feb. 7, 2024. Steve Carlson/STAFF. A lot has been said about Sphere in Las Vegas being game-changing for concerts, and it’s all true. The technology that went into this insane $2.3-billion building is as mind-boggling as you’ve heard. It completely changes…

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF. As you prepare to shovel seven pounds of bean dip into your pie hole and slurp down 25 Budweisers using a football game as an excuse, making yourself wish you were dead come Monday morning, I pose a question: Why? Doesn’t Super Bowl Sunday usually feel…

Insert Foot is cool with Taylor Swift but less so with the NFL and the Super Bowl. Let’s talk Tay-Tay, Trav-Trav and how, yes, of course the biggest story in professional football continues right through the Super Bowl, because how could it not? The points: In this corner, the…

Insert Foot on the demise of Pitchfork and music criticism. I thought I had it bad getting death threats from 14-year-old girls when I’d write that the Backstreet Boys were on their last legs. I was right, but the death threats and insults were kind of fun. It beats…

Original: Jerry Lewis (L) looks through a cine camera during the shooting of “The Day the Clown Cried” at Cirque D’Hiver in Paris on March 22, 1972. STF/AFP. One of the film world’s biggest mysteries could be solved this year. How horrifying is Jerry Lewis’ 1972 Holocaust film, “The…

Insert Foot on the new (old) controversy surrounding “Nevermind” by Nirvana. The kid who got famous on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind just got his lawsuit against the band revived by a federal appeals court. He says the iconic photo of him naked, swimming after a dollar bill, is…

Burner Herzog, courtesy Martin Bisi. For tens of thousands of years before Sigmund Freud and the advent of modern psychology, human beings struggled to maintain their sanity with the help of art and religion. This year Burner Herzog‘s latest album, Random Person, got me through some rough months. Like…

We’ve used this image a lot to end every year since 2016. Design: Roman Gokhman. There’s a tradition at RIFF, as well as most other sites, to spend the last week of the year doing Best-Of stories. Best of the site’s work, best of the year, best all sorts…