Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Yellowstone ended, and every streaming service has spent the time since trying to build its own ranch to move into. Netflix’s version is Ransom Canyon, and its second season just rode in at number three on the platform worldwide. If you came to find out whether it is worth eight hours, the honest answer depends … Read more
I didn’t expect to have much to say about a Kevin Hart bachelor-party comedy, and the early reviews suggested I wouldn’t. 72 Hours landed on Netflix on July 24 with a 16% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that usually files a movie under “content” and moves on. Then it went to number … Read more
In the summer of 2016, strangers started showing up at a condo in Anaheim, California, expecting sex. A Craigslist ad had invited them. A woman there, it said, wanted to act out a rape fantasy, and any resistance she put up was part of the game. The men were real. The ad was not. … Read more
Television keeps a short list of shows that ended exactly where they should have and then had the grace to stay gone. Ted Lasso sat near the top of it. Season three sent Ted home to Kansas, married off Coach Beard, handed Roy the team, and rolled credits on a story its makers had … Read more
In June, Supergirl was a punchline. DC’s new film, only the second in a rebooted universe, opened to brutal reviews and worse math, one of the loudest box office misfires of the year. Six weeks later, the same movie is the number one title people are renting at home. It did not get recut. … Read more
For most of its first hour, The Drama behaves. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, a couple a week away from their wedding, and the film hands you the movie the trailer sold: two of the most photographed actors alive, a gorgeous engagement, the low comic hum of a big … Read more
When Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds in 2005, he said something revealing about it. For the first time in his life, he told Empire, he was making an alien picture with no love in it and no attempt at communication. It was his fourth story about visitors from elsewhere, and it was … Read more
You know the image even if you have never set foot in Pompeii. A body curled on its side in the ash, knees drawn up, caught in the instant the mountain took it. For the better part of three centuries those plaster casts have taught the world one lesson about the city: that death … Read more
The first Mortal Kombat movie, back in 2021, made one famously strange choice: it never held the tournament. Two hours of gathering fighters and training them, and the actual Mortal Kombat got pushed to a sequel that took five years to show up. Mortal Kombat II, on HBO Max since July 24 after a … Read more
Judith and Debbie have been best friends for twenty years. They travel together, they haunt antique shops, they belong to the same book club. Debbie believes Judith is a forensic accountant. Judith is actually a contract killer who has spent those same twenty years billing millions to a shadow agency for the people she … Read more