Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In Tyler Perry’s Doing Life, Trina has been taking money that belongs to her mother, Cathy, with help from a lawyer. Her sister Anika’s boyfriend, Carousel, uncovers the secret near the end of the film. Trina defends herself by claiming she is owed for caring for their mother and contributing to the household. She presents … Read more
In Netflix’s 2026 East of Eden, Adam Trask rejects his son Cal’s money because it comes from wartime bean trading. Adam considers the profit morally tainted. Cal had hoped to replace what his father lost in business and finally earn his approval. That difference makes the refusal so damaging: Adam judges how the money was … Read more
Near the end of Don’t Say Good Luck, Sophie Birenbaum walks to the front of her school stage and sings “She Used to Be Mine.” She is sixteen, cast almost by accident in the lead of a student production of Waitress. In the musical, that song belongs to a grown woman looking back at … Read more
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
You spend a good part of We Live in Time unsure of when you are. One scene has Almut and Tobias meeting for the first time. The next has them raising a young daughter. Another drops back to a hospital room that resets everything you have watched so far. The film never flags these … Read more
Every Robin Hood movie you have seen ends long before this one begins. The arrows find their mark, the Merry Men scatter into the greenwood, the Sheriff gets his comeuppance, and the legend rides off intact. The Death of Robin Hood, the A24 drama starring Hugh Jackman that opened in theaters in June and has … Read more
If you are here for the short answer, the biological father is Emilio Martinez, played by Erik Hayser, a man from a relationship Maca kept buried for twenty years. My Daughter’s Father, the Mexican drama that arrived on Netflix on July 22 under its original title El otro padre, does not hide this for long. … 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 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
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