Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Somewhere in the last stretch of The Strangers: Chapter 2, you start to notice the movie is not going to end. Not really. It just stops, mid-chase, with the door left open for another film. If that feels like a pause instead of an ending, there is a concrete reason, and it has nothing … Read more
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 arrived on Netflix this month carrying two numbers that do not belong together: 17 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 82 percent from audiences. That gap is not a rounding error. It tells you how this franchise works. The basics first, since people come looking for them. It … Read more
Charlie Heller is a CIA codebreaker who is brilliant with patterns and useless with a gun. When his wife is killed in a terrorist attack in London and his superiors decide the case isn’t worth chasing, he does the only thing a man like that can do. He blackmails the agency into training him, … Read more
On the night of 21 December 1988, a bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people were killed in the air and on the ground. What followed became the largest criminal investigation in British history. The Bombing of Pan Am 103, … Read more
A small Lifetime movie is sitting at number two on Netflix right now, one slot behind a Kevin Hart comedy that cost many times its budget, and the reason has almost nothing to do with 2025. His, Hers & Ours works because of a bet Terry McMillan placed more than thirty years ago and … Read more
Jodie Foster has spoken French since she was a child. She spent twelve years at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and for decades she has dubbed her own performances into French for the release prints, so audiences there have been hearing her, in her own voice, all along. The one thing she had … Read more
When Amy Robertson buries her father, she expects to inherit a charity and a family name worth being proud of. Instead she inherits a key to a storage locker she never knew he rented, and inside it, wrapped and hidden, is the decomposing body of a woman. The Body in the Locker, a 2025 … Read more
Emma Thompson has spent forty years playing the smartest and warmest person in the room: Sense and Sensibility, Howards End, the magical nanny who mends broken families. Casting her as the lead of a snowbound survival thriller sounds like a mismatch, and Dead of Winter knows it. The film hands her a role usually … Read more
Before Echo Valley, Brad Ingelsby wrote Mare of Easttown, the HBO series about a worn-down detective in working-class Pennsylvania carrying more grief than any case could hold. Echo Valley is that same world shrunk to two people and one farm. Julianne Moore plays Kate, a horse trainer in southern Pennsylvania still grieving the wife … Read more
The most unbelievable part of Roofman is the part the filmmakers did not invent. A decorated Army veteran robbed dozens of McDonald’s by cutting holes in their roofs, escaped a forty-five-year prison sentence, and then hid for months inside a Toys R Us, living off the shelves and watching the employees on baby monitors. … Read more