Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Most true crime hurries toward the person who did it, angling for the interrogation room, the profile, the scene where a detective finally explains the mind behind the knife. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, the three-part Netflix series that landed on July 29, walks the other way, and that decision is the most interesting thing … 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
Yes, it is a true story, and that is the first thing most people want confirmed. The woman at the center of Hulu’s My Grandfather Charles Manson is Sophia Maddox, a real filmmaker and actress, and she really is the granddaughter of the man who orchestrated the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The documentary, number one on … 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
For fifteen years, the person who understood Chris Evert most completely was the woman on the other side of the net trying to beat her. Netflix’s new documentary is about a tennis rivalry, but it is really about that stranger fact: how the opponent can end up being the witness. Chris & Martina: The Final … Read more
A police officer stops a woman on a Texas road for speeding and driving like something is very wrong. She tells him she has just given birth. There is a newborn in the car, and the baby is real. Almost nothing else she says that day turns out to be. That traffic stop is where … Read more