Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Mica Miller, the 30-year-old wife of a South Carolina pastor, was found dead at a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024. Authorities ruled it a suicide, and the documentary does not dispute that. So if you came looking for a hidden killer, Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not that kind of … Read more
For almost its entire runtime, The Last Sunrise looks like a dying-girl romance. A sick young woman, a gorgeous island, a summer love with a countdown attached. But the trailer keeps one thing to itself: Ry (Maia Reficco) does not die. She survives her worst crisis, and she and Julian (Fernando Lindez) are still … Read more
Talamasca: The Secret Order spent late August near the top of Netflix’s TV chart, which is a strange fate for a show its own network had already given up on. AMC aired the six-episode gothic thriller last fall, canceled it in March, and moved on. The odd part is what the Netflix numbers prove. The … Read more
In Blood Sacrifice, the Swedish thriller that reached number one on Netflix, someone is killing police officers. The deaths always come at 1:15 in the morning, always after a call to 112, the emergency line. For most of the five episodes it plays like a hunt for a faceless serial killer. It is not. … Read more
The Devil’s Mouth ends with a single survivor. Sara (Kathryn Newton) is the only one of the group who climbs out of the flooded cave alive, and she does it by turning the cave itself into a weapon. Her best friend Max (Lana Condor) does not make it, and neither do the others on the … Read more
Facing El Chapo opens with a title that promises a cartel legend, then spends most of its ninety-one minutes somewhere much smaller: a roadside motel, two tired federal cops, and the most wanted man in the hemisphere sitting on a bed, waiting for backup that might not come. So the question most viewers bring … 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
When the trailer dropped back in June, all we really had was a family sealed inside their own home and a title that sounded like a warning. Now the film is here, it’s the number one movie on Netflix worldwide, and the question everyone is searching is the same one the trailer left hanging: … Read more
If you just finished Sterling Point on Prime Video and went looking for what actually happened, here is the short version. Annie, the New York teenager who inherits a remote Canadian island from a grandfather she never knew, doesn’t only find a summer and a crush out there. She finds a sister, Ramona, and … Read more