One sharp,
opinionated
read.
A weekly dispatch curating film, music, books, and live performance — written for people who believe taste is a practice, not an algorithm.
What's in Issue 142
Why The Brutalist earns its three-and-a-half hours — and where it quietly breaks your heart
The Mk.gee deep cut your Spotify wrapped will never find for you
Percival Everett's James — the galley read worth clearing your evening for
Dispatch from the Phoebe Bridgers residency — what she played that wasn't on the setlist
Delivered every Friday
4,200+ creative directors, publicists, and omnivores
The Galley That Cleared My Morning
Percival Everett's James does something that should be impossible: it makes you laugh inside a story that is fundamentally about the cost of being seen. The voice — Jim's voice, the real one, not the one he performs for Huck — arrives like cold water. You drink it too fast and feel it all the way down. I read the first forty pages over coffee that had gone cold, and I didn't notice.
— cleared my whole Tuesday
"Marquee is the first newsletter I've opened before my second cup of coffee in years."
Camille Osei
Creative Director, Wieden+Kennedy
Three and a Half Hours Well Spent
Here is what Brady Corbet understands that most directors his age don't: scale is emotional, not logistical. The Brutalist is long because grief is long. The intermission isn't a theatrical affectation — it's a structural argument. You need the fifteen minutes to process what you've already seen, because what comes after assumes you have. The architecture in this film isn't backdrop. It's the film's nervous system.
— ★★★★½ — earn your ticket
"I walked into a client pitch last Monday quoting this film essay. Closed the room."
Tobias Reinholt
Head of Brand, Sonos
The Mk.gee Deep Cut
Two Star & The Dream Police is not an album for the gym or the commute. It's an album for the specific hour when the light changes and you're not sure if you're tired or just paying attention differently. Mk.gee makes guitar sound like it's remembering something. Track seven — "Rockman" — doesn't resolve. It just stops. And somehow that's more satisfying than any chorus he could have written.
— play at dusk, repeat
"I found three albums this year through Marquee. My Spotify algorithm is still catching up."
Priya Venkataraman
Music Supervisor, A24
What She Played That Wasn't on the Setlist
Phoebe Bridgers played "Moon Song" alone, no band, at the end of the second night. It wasn't on the setlist anyone had photographed at soundcheck. Half the room had already put their phones away. The other half had them out and pointed at the stage, which is the exact wrong way to be in the same room as that song. She finished, said nothing, walked off. The encore was "Funeral." I am not going to be fine.
— was there. still not recovered.
"I used to have six streaming subscriptions. Now I have Marquee and a library card."
Jordan Fitzgerald
Publicist, Shore Fire Media
This week's
full issue.
Experience the product before you subscribe. No summary, no teaser — the actual issue, inline. Read it here, then decide.
Friday, February 28, 2026
The Architecture of Grief: On The Brutalist
Brady Corbet made a three-and-a-half-hour film about a Hungarian Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to America, and the film's length is not indulgence — it's argument. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, doing the best work of a long career) arrives in Pennsylvania with nothing but his training and his trauma, and what Corbet wants to show us is that the two are inseparable.
The film is structured around a single commission: a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce, icy and precise) hires Tóth to build a community center. The project takes decades. So does the film. The architecture in The Brutalist isn't metaphor — it's the film's actual subject. Tóth believes that buildings can hold what people cannot. He is wrong, but beautifully wrong, which is the only way to be wrong in art.
See it in 70mm if you can. The intermission is not a gimmick. You will need it.
Two Star & The Dream Police: An Argument for Stillness
Mk.gee's debut album arrived last February with no warning and no context, which is the only appropriate way to release music that sounds like it was recorded in a room that doesn't exist yet. The guitar on this record sounds like it's remembering something — not playing, remembering.
Track seven, "Rockman," is four minutes and twelve seconds of not quite resolving. It doesn't build to a chorus. It doesn't release. It just accumulates tension until it stops. This is a formal choice, and it's the right one. The album is for the hour when the light changes and you're not sure if you're tired or paying attention differently. Probably both.
Percival Everett's James: The Voice Underneath
Everett's James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective — which is to say, it's a novel about performance and the cost of being seen. The Jim who narrates this book has two voices: the one he uses around white people, which is the voice Twain recorded, and the one he uses when he's alone, which is the voice of a man who reads philosophy and has been paying very close attention.
The novel is funny in ways that catch you off guard and devastating in ways that don't. Everett doesn't announce his effects. He just makes them. The galley has been sitting on my desk for two weeks and I keep picking it up to reread the last ten pages. That's the whole review.
This is what lands in your inbox every Friday.
Deliver Every FridayWritten in the
margins.
4,200 readers send us notes every Friday. These are the ones that ended up in our margins.
"I forwarded the Brutalist piece to my entire creative team before our Monday brief. It reframed the whole conversation."
Delphine Moreau
Executive Creative Director
Anomaly Paris
"Marquee is the only newsletter I've never unsubscribed from in four years. The voice is irreplaceable."
Marcus Webb
VP, Brand Strategy
Beats by Dre
"I track what's breaking outside my own clients. Marquee finds it before anyone else does."
Suki Tanaka
Senior Publicist
Rogers & Cowan
"Canceled Hulu, kept Marquee. Best content decision I've made since I stopped checking Twitter."
Nate Okonkwo
Film Critic
The Ringer
"Every album recommendation from the past year has been right. Not helpful — right."
Amara Singh
Music Supervisor
FX Networks
"The writing trusts that you're smart. That alone is worth the inbox real estate."
Theo Hartmann
Book Editor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Marquee arrives in your inbox like a handwritten note from someone who watched the screeners, read the galleys, and stayed for the encore. One issue, every Friday. No name required.
Your inbox deserves one good thing.
4,200+
subscribers
142
issues published