Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
If you just finished My Life with the Walter Boys Season 3 and reached for your phone to find out whether Jackie and Cole are finally, officially together, here’s the short answer: they’re not. Not yet, and maybe not for a while. Cole ends things before the finale is over. Jackie, the Manhattan orphan who … Read more
On the night of 21 December 1988, a bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people were killed in the air and on the ground. What followed became the largest criminal investigation in British history. The Bombing of Pan Am 103, … Read more
Jodie Foster has spoken French since she was a child. She spent twelve years at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and for decades she has dubbed her own performances into French for the release prints, so audiences there have been hearing her, in her own voice, all along. The one thing she had … Read more
The first Mortal Kombat movie, back in 2021, made one famously strange choice: it never held the tournament. Two hours of gathering fighters and training them, and the actual Mortal Kombat got pushed to a sequel that took five years to show up. Mortal Kombat II, on HBO Max since July 24 after a … 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
Backrooms does not end with a rescue. Clark walks into the yellow halls and stops coming back, and the therapist who follows him out again is not the woman who went in. If you came for the short version, that is it. But the ending only lands once you accept what the film has … Read more
Matías takes a job coaching at a swimming club, and his employer offers him a second one on the side. Fernando will pay him to sleep with Fernando’s wife and send back video of it. Matías takes that job too. Desire, the Mexican thriller that landed on Netflix on July 17 and went straight … Read more
When Amy Robertson buries her father, she expects to inherit a charity and a family name worth being proud of. Instead she inherits a key to a storage locker she never knew he rented, and inside it, wrapped and hidden, is the decomposing body of a woman. The Body in the Locker, a 2025 … Read more
Every Scream movie holds up a mirror to the horror of its moment. The 1996 original mocked the rules of the slasher while obeying every one of them. The recent requels went after legacy sequels and the possessive fans who guard them. Scream 7 reaches for the sharpest idea the series has had in … Read more
Every part of Strung is right there in the title. Chloe Bailey plays Laila, a gifted violinist whose whole world is strings. She takes a live-in job tutoring a wealthy family’s young daughter, and she is slowly strung along by people who know exactly which of her wounds to pull on. When the movie … Read more