If you Google Liberace, the word “flamboyant” turns up repeatedly. A double-edged epithet, “flamboyant” has long been a common euphemism for a campy gay sensibility and also aptly defines the career of a crowd-pleasing pianist who, almost despite himself, ended up having an enormous influence on American popular culture. Sporting an impeccably coiffed pompadour (simulated, in later years, by well-positioned wigs) Liberace performed in gold lamé suits and sequins for largely conservative, heterosexual audiences. During the 1950s, his television program introduced millions of viewers to classical music through virtuosic, if gimmicky, interpretations of Chopin and Liszt.

Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, which premiered Tuesday at Cannes, stars, however incongruously, Michael Douglas as Elvis and Elton John’s self-mocking predecessor. The film, which will be broadcast on HBO on May 26, is less concerned with chronicling Liberace’s musical and cultural legacy than zeroing in on the most notorious years of his career—his tumultuous relationship with the much younger Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), an earnest young hunk and animal trainer who triumphs over a stable of rivals to become the illustrious man’s occasional chauffeur and full-time lover. Despite a tonal shift that converts Candelabra’s initially farcical ambiance into darker melodramatic terrain—imagine an eccentric amalgam of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Scenes from a Marriage— Soderbergh’s film rings changes on a Hollywood staple: musical biopics like Walk the Line that chart an iconic star’s road from addiction to eventual redemption.

Juicy J is high as fuck.

We’re seated next to one another inside Irving Plaza, a midsize music venue in lower Manhattan. It’s three in the afternoon, and stagehands can be seen scurrying about hauling various rigging in preparation for Juicy J’s sold-out show later that night. The rapper and I are aglow in red light—fitting, given the similar lighting in the music video for his solo hit “Bandz a Make Her Dance,” which has seemingly supplanted Tyga’s “Rack City” as the de facto strip-club anthem.

It is virtually impossible to talk about The Fall—BBC Two’s addictive and provocative serial-killer drama that begins streaming stateside on Netflix on May 28—without mentioning the ghost in the room: Prime Suspect.

The allusion to Prime Suspect, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, is well founded. For one, The Fall is the closest that television has come to capturing the taut alchemy of Prime Suspect: part police chase, part psychological portrait of the hunted and the hunter. At the time of its premiere in 1992, Prime Suspect captured the institutional misogyny of the Metropolitan Police and placed at its center Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, a knife-sharp detective who wasn’t content to hover at the edges of a “man’s world.” Over the seven seasons that Mirren portrayed Jane, viewers came to see her as a brilliant, if flawed, protagonist who somehow remained tethered to the glass ceiling that she had shattered and who turned to drink and sex to dull the loneliness of her life.

Ahead of Steven Soderbergh’s film Behind the Candelabra, which debuts on HBO next week and tells the love story of Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his boy-toy lover Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), a primer on the great entertainer.

Who was he again?

Sofia Coppola’s upcoming movie, Bling Ring, is based on a real group of teens and 20-something friends and acquaintances who began robbing the rich and famous in 2008. Over the course of the following year, they stole from Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, and Megan Fox, and raided Paris Hilton’s house five (!) times (She helpfully left a key under the mat.)

Before they were busted, the group snagged $3 million in loot, including $2 million worth of jewelry from the Hilton fortune heiress, stole Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton luggage from Bloom, and essentially went shopping in Partridge’s designer-laden pad. All members of the crew have since seen their day in court. A few members of the real-life Bling Ring have had a more illustrious postscript than others.

When the long-awaited fourth Daft Punk studio record was streamed last week after months of tantalizing teases and leaks, much of the world collectively yawned. Two French men had spent untold amounts of money and several years in the studio and they came out with…a chilled out disco record?

The world wanted to know: Where is the anthem, that track made for the peak hour on the dance floor that Daft Punk is so good at creating? The closest you’ll get on Random Access Memories is the addictive, funky first single “Get Lucky,” and it’s pretty soft by Daft Punk standards.