Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Frances Neagley offers Jack Reacher her hand at her father’s funeral because she trusts him enough to try a form of closeness she usually avoids. His arrival gives that trust a familiar basis: he has come to support her when she needs him. In the finale of Neagley, Prime Video’s Reacher spinoff, the private investigator … Read more
In Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Charlie reunites the veteran magicians known as the Horsemen to take revenge on Veronika Vanderberg, the diamond heiress responsible for his mother’s death. He is Veronika’s half-brother, and he has concealed that connection while appearing to be one of the young magicians recruited for a heist. The … Read more
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
Wen survives Knock at the Cabin. Her two fathers, Eric and Andrew, are married. Four strangers hold the family hostage and claim the world will end unless they sacrifice one of their own. At the film’s end, Eric offers his life and asks Andrew to shoot him. Andrew does, then leaves with Wen as the … Read more
Death walks away because Puss has stopped treating his life as disposable. The wolf survives their final fight, recognizes the change in his opponent, and ends the pursuit. Puss gets to keep living, with one life left. He has neither killed Death nor won his missing lives back. That distinction, supported by the ending accounts … Read more
The Runner cheats, and I think the cheat is the best argument the movie has. Here is the short answer. Maia Marten never kills the witness she is sent to kill. The gun she fires on the 53rd floor of the Excelsus Hotel holds blanks, the blood is a rig the police set up in … Read more
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
The woman credited as the author of The Secret Woman does not exist. “Anna Ekberg” is a pen name two Danish men, Anders Ronnow Klarlund and Jacob Weinreich, adopted to write the novel, and Klarlund later helped produce this Netflix adaptation of the book he wrote as her. Keep that in your pocket, because … Read more
By its last stretch, The Whisper Man has two questions left to answer, and it closes them almost back to back. The person taking children this time is not Frank Carter, the original Whisper Man, who is still behind bars. It is Frank’s grown son, Francis Jr., who has spent the whole film in … Read more