Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The chalkboard gag reads: I did not predict any of this crap! That is the show swatting away thirty years of people posting old screenshots and insisting it saw the future. Then it goes ahead and does an episode about screens ruining people, which is exactly the territory that meme lives in. Yellow Mirror … Read more
Near the end of 9 to 5, the chairman of the board walks through an office that is running better than he has ever seen it. Productivity is up twenty percent. There is a daycare down the hall. People are on flexible hours, and two women are splitting one job so that both can … Read more
When Jon Favreau finished the 2019 Lion King, the photoreal remake that rebuilt Simba out of pure computer animation, he came away wanting the opposite of what he had just made. He wanted a real lion. Lion, the four-part National Geographic series he executive produced, is that wish carried out over four years in … Read more
Camp Rock 3 opens on a problem most bands would kill for. Connect 3, the Jonas Brothers back in character as Shane, Nate, and Jason Gray, are about to launch a reunion tour, and they have no one to open for them. So they do the only sensible thing three pop stars would do: … 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
Moana arrives in theaters on July 10, a decade after the animated film that made her one of Disney’s most beloved heroines. The reviews are already out, and they are split down the middle: one outlet calls it a low point in Disney’s relentless remake run, another calls it one of the studio’s better live-action … Read more
Somewhere in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly picks up her own September issue, the object the entire fashion calendar once bent itself around, and remarks that it has gotten thin enough to floss with. The line is played for a laugh. It is the truest sentence in the film. Twenty years ago … Read more
This week, two very different movies named Avatar landed on streaming, and the overlap is almost funny. One is the live-action remake of the cartoon, now into its second season. The other is the one that made close to a billion and a half dollars at the box office. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the … Read more
Toy Story 4 ended with a decision that felt, at the time, like a conclusion. Woody chose to stay behind with Bo Peep, giving up his place with Bonnie and the other toys to live as a lost toy — free, unclaimed, no longer defined by a child’s need for him. It was a … Read more