Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
A worn-out sheriff takes a quiet posting in a small Minnesota town called Normal, hoping to put some distance between himself and his own wreckage. The place is prosperous, polite, and far too calm. Then a bank robbery goes wrong, his own deputies open fire on civilians, and Sheriff Ulysses, played by Bob Odenkirk, … Read more
Somewhere in the last stretch of The Strangers: Chapter 2, you start to notice the movie is not going to end. Not really. It just stops, mid-chase, with the door left open for another film. If that feels like a pause instead of an ending, there is a concrete reason, and it has nothing … Read more
Materialists was sold as the summer’s glossy love triangle: Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal’s money and Chris Evans’s charm, all of it wrapped in A24 sheen. That is the movie people bought a ticket for. It is not quite the movie Celine Song made. Before she wrote Past Lives, Song spent months working … Read more
You spend a good part of We Live in Time unsure of when you are. One scene has Almut and Tobias meeting for the first time. The next has them raising a young daughter. Another drops back to a hospital room that resets everything you have watched so far. The film never flags these … Read more