Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist uses handmade animation because its directors wanted an intimate, tactile way into a subject usually explained through screens and expert interviews. Co-director Charlie Tyrell told POV that the imperfections of physical objects, including fingerprints on puppets, were part of the appeal. The choice gave the film … Read more
Mr. T’s pastor sat for two days of interviews. About thirty seconds of that ended up in the finished film. That number comes from Mr. T. He was telling reporters it was garbage before it had even come out. Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool arrived on September 8, runs forty-eight minutes, and … Read more
Why would a filmmaker make the five-hour version first and the ninety-seven-minute version second? Brian Knappenberger did. In 2021 he released Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, five episodes running an hour or more apiece. On September 2 he returned to the same subject with Turning Point: Generation 9/11, one film, ninety-seven … Read more
In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot … 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
For one night in January 2006, Vince Young was the best football player alive. Texas trailed USC by five in the Rose Bowl with the national title on the line, and with nineteen seconds left Young ran it in himself, eight yards, nobody able to lay a hand on him. He finished that night with … Read more
On the third day of giving sworn testimony against Boeing, John Barnett was found dead in his parked truck in Charleston. He had left a note that ended, “I hope Boeing pays.” Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, now on Netflix and already one of the platform’s most watched films, builds itself around that morning. … Read more
Yes. A Child of My Own, currently the fourth most watched film on Netflix in the United States, is built on a real case, and the true story is colder than the soft one the movie opens with. For its first stretch, the film plays like a warm melodrama about a woman aching to … Read more
Joe Berlinger has spent years pointing a microphone at America’s most infamous killers and letting them talk. The Ted Bundy Tapes, The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, The Son of Sam Tapes. Each one hands you the voice of a man who did the killing with his own hands, and the … 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