Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
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 title of Wardriver is a real thing. Wardriving is the practice of cruising a city with a laptop, sweeping for wireless networks to break into, stealing while you keep moving so you never have to look at anyone you take from. That distance is the whole story Cole tells himself: if he is … Read more
Sam Raimi’s Send Help looks like a two-person survival story: a plane goes down, an employee and her boss wash up on a deserted island, and they have to get along or die. About halfway through, it quietly stops being that movie. The island is not the trap. The office is, and Linda has … 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
The rules of the Long Walk fit in a single breath. Fifty teenage boys, one from each state, start walking down a two-lane highway. Slow down and you collect a warning; collect three, and a soldier shoots you where you stand, which the game cheerfully calls buying your ticket. The last boy on his … 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
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
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy started streaming on HBO Max on July 3, and anyone pressing play expecting bandages and a cursed pharaoh is about to be thrown. There is no shambling corpse in wrappings here. Cronin, the director of Evil Dead Rise, has called his version “one part Poltergeist, one part Seven,” and that … Read more
Start with the answer people come searching for. The villain of The Housemaid is Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar), the charming husband who locks his wives in the attic. For most of its two hours the film aims you at Nina instead, the fragile, erratic wife who seems bent on tormenting her new maid, and … Read more
If you came here straight from the last ten minutes of Old Henry, here is the short version. Yes, the quiet Oklahoma farmer is Billy the Kid. He did not die in 1881. The death was staged, with the help of the lawman who was supposed to have put him in the ground, and … Read more