Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
If you have just watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come on Hulu and want the ending laid out plainly: Grace survives again, and again she manages it without ever being the strongest person in the room. She wins by finding a loophole in the rules the rich people hunting her wrote for … Read more
If you have just finished Project Hail Mary and want the ending in plain terms: Ryland Grace saves both Earth and an alien world, and then he chooses not to go home. He spends the rest of his life twelve light-years away, on a planet whose air would kill him, teaching science to children … Read more
Bear gets exactly what he wishes for. The tragedy is that it works. He asks a cheap occult trinket to make the girl he loves want him more than anyone in the world, and it obeys him to the letter, which turns out to be a kind of murder. If you are here because … Read more
The scariest movie on HBO Max right now cost less than a used car and barely shows you its monster. Undertone, a tiny Canadian horror film that slipped into theaters in March and reached the platform on June 25, spent its first weekend as the most-watched thing on the service. It works because it understands … Read more
I went into the third season of House of the Dragon braced for a battle, and the premiere handed me one of the largest ever put on television. What I did not expect was to walk away thinking less about the ships and the fire than about a girl on the back of a dragon … Read more
A standard handgun needs about five pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire. Glock once turned that number into a selling point: five pounds was light enough that the pull would not throw off your aim. 5lbs of Pressure takes that grim little fact and builds a whole movie around it, and the question … Read more
Spy stories usually end with the agent winning or dying. The Agency ends its second season with something harder to name: Martian wins, survives, and loses the one thing the job was always going to take. All ten episodes of the second season landed at once on June 21, on Paramount+ with Showtime, and the … Read more
For five seasons, The Bear kept asking the same question: does making something great have to cost you everything you have? Its series finale finally answers, and the answer is not the Michelin star the whole show had been chasing. All eight episodes of the fifth and final season landed at once on June 25, … Read more
I Will Find You, Harlan Coben’s latest Netflix thriller, raced to the top of the charts after its June 18 release, and it ends the way his best stories do, with a long-buried lie blowing a family apart. The eight-episode mystery turns on three questions: is David’s son really alive, who took him, and who … Read more
Black Phone 2 is now streaming, and it sends Finney and Gwen up against a Grabber who is no longer quite human. The sequel ends with a frozen lake, three vengeful ghosts, and a phone call that recasts the whole story. If you want the ending untangled, here is what actually happens, what the twist … Read more