Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Every part of Strung is right there in the title. Chloe Bailey plays Laila, a gifted violinist whose whole world is strings. She takes a live-in job tutoring a wealthy family’s young daughter, and she is slowly strung along by people who know exactly which of her wounds to pull on. When the movie … Read more
Reminders of Him spends most of its runtime on a locked door. Kenna Rowan gets out of prison and wants one thing: to meet the daughter she has never held, a five-year-old being raised by the grandparents who blame Kenna for their son’s death. The people keeping her out are not villains. They are … Read more
The title of Wardriver is a real thing. Wardriving is the practice of cruising a city with a laptop, sweeping for wireless networks to break into, stealing while you keep moving so you never have to look at anyone you take from. That distance is the whole story Cole tells himself: if he is … Read more
Sam Raimi’s Send Help looks like a two-person survival story: a plane goes down, an employee and her boss wash up on a deserted island, and they have to get along or die. About halfway through, it quietly stops being that movie. The island is not the trap. The office is, and Linda has … Read more
The mother at the center of Nothing to Lose asks for something hospitals run every day: one blood test. The boy who could give it is not her own sick son but a stranger, a possible donor being raised by another family a car ride away. That family says no, the law backs their … Read more
Since 2023, no movie has been streamed in American homes more than the animated Moana. Nielsen clocked it above eleven billion minutes that year, then watched the number climb even higher in 2024, nearly a decade after the film left theaters. Those are the households Disney invited back this month, asking them to pay … Read more
The rules of the Long Walk fit in a single breath. Fifty teenage boys, one from each state, start walking down a two-lane highway. Slow down and you collect a warning; collect three, and a soldier shoots you where you stand, which the game cheerfully calls buying your ticket. The last boy on his … Read more
On March 3 of this year, Netflix renewed Little House on the Prairie for a second season. The first season would not premiere for another four months, and nobody outside the building had seen a frame of it. Streamers almost never do that. The confidence tells you what Netflix believed it was buying: an … Read more
On the night of January 13, 2012, a cruise ship carrying more than 4,000 people steered toward a small Tuscan island so the village on shore could watch it glide past, lit up like a floating city. Sailors call the maneuver an inchino, a bow. Minutes later the Costa Concordia struck a cluster of … Read more
Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) plans the perfect Nantucket weekend to outrun her grief, and the weekend answers by handing her the one secret she was not braced for. The friend who arrived carrying the heaviest sorrow, Gigi (Gemma Chan), turns out to be the woman her late husband had been seeing. That is the … Read more