Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Some movies are content to tell you a story. In the Hand of Dante wants to grab you by the collar and drag you across seven centuries. Julian Schnabel’s new film, which played at Venice last fall and arrived on Netflix on June 24 after a brief run in theaters, is a literary heist, … Read more
Voicemails for Isabelle arrived on Netflix on June 19 and shot straight to the top of the movie chart, which is the kind of thing that happens when a rom-com has a hook this clean. A grieving woman keeps leaving voicemails for her dead sister, not knowing the number has been reassigned to a stranger … Read more
Black Phone 2 is now streaming, and it sends Finney and Gwen up against a Grabber who is no longer quite human. The sequel ends with a frozen lake, three vengeful ghosts, and a phone call that recasts the whole story. If you want the ending untangled, here is what actually happens, what the twist … Read more
Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day … Read more
Colors of Evil: Black, the Polish thriller that climbed into Netflix’s Top 10 within days of its June 10 release, is built like a missing-child mystery and ends as something much darker: a portrait of an entire town that chose to look away. If you have finished it and want the knots untangled, here is … Read more
On paper, Song Sung Blue sounds like a punchline. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, two of the most charismatic movie stars alive, playing a married couple who spent their lives in a Neil Diamond tribute band in Milwaukee. You can already hear the sequins rustling. But the film, which landed on Netflix on June 13 … Read more
The Marked Woman, Netflix’s Spanish original thriller that shot into the Top 10 within days of its June 5 release, runs on a single question: who is the woman found beaten half to death in a shipping container in Barcelona, with no memory of her own name? If you have reached the end and … Read more
You have seen this story. A small kid with a big dream, written off as too little to compete, gets one improbable shot at the big leagues and has to prove the doubters wrong. GOAT, the animated sports comedy now climbing the Netflix charts, does not pretend otherwise. Its plot is the underdog template in … Read more
Colin is in his thirties. He lives with his parents outside London, works at a parking garage, and sings in a family barbershop quartet. That is the entire shape of his life when Pillion begins, and Harry Melling plays him with a stoop in his shoulders that tells you he has stopped expecting anything … Read more
He-Man has been away from movie screens for forty years. Masters of the Universe, which opens in theaters today, brings him back — and the most interesting thing about the film is not the hero. It’s the villain. Jared Leto plays Skeletor with a commitment that is genuinely unexpected. The character is absurd by … Read more