I'm Stephen McAfin. This is the Slate Culture Gapfest, Lily Allen's Revenge Tour edition. It's Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. On today's show, Blue Moon is the latest feature film from the director Richard

Linklater. It stars Ethan Hawke as Lauren's Heart, the famed lyricist who with Richard Rogers

wrote such classics of the American songbook as My Funny Valentine, The Lady is a Tramp,

and yes, the titular Blue Moon. The movie depicts the night, his career, and effectively

his life came to an end. It also stars Margaret Qualley and Bobby Connovali. And then Down Cemetery

Road is on Apple TV. It's based on an early book by the novelist Mick Heron. He's the author

who brought us the gang over in Sloughhouse. This one stars Emma Thompson as a private investigator. Her name is

Zoe Baum, and Ruth Wilson as Sarah, an art restorer living in Oxford, who believes she's

happened upon a sinister conspiracy. And finally, we discussed Lily Allen's new album, West End Girl,

a collection of songs that adds up to and at times shockingly unfiltered account of the breakup

of her marriage to the actor David Harbour. But first joining me today is Julia Turner from Los Angeles. She is a fellow at the Annanburg Center for Journalism at the University of Southern California. Hey, Julia. Hello, hello. And of course, Dana Stevens, who's the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana. Hello. Let's discuss. I think we've

got some juice here. Let's see what we can do with it. Over the course of what now has to be

reckoned an extraordinary career, Richard Linkletter has been the master of the long. What would you

call it? Khan is not the right word, but sort of the opposite of Khan. It just keeps giving us

unexpected bounties that we're germinating

in the dark somewhere before being released into theaters or streaming platforms. Anyway,

whatever the right word is, he turned, for example, what felt at the time like a one-off curio

of a rom-con before sunrise into a seven-up style trilogy about identity, aging, and loss,

spent a handful of days, of off days over the years, over a decade, really, filming boyhood.

Now with Blue Moon, he kind of reverses it. He ratchets, I mean, it did take 10 years to come to the

screen because they were waiting for Ethan Hawk, I guess, to be old enough to play Lauren's heart.

But in another sense, he's ratcheted everything down to observe a very strict unity of time

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