Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
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
Emma Thompson has spent forty years playing the smartest and warmest person in the room: Sense and Sensibility, Howards End, the magical nanny who mends broken families. Casting her as the lead of a snowbound survival thriller sounds like a mismatch, and Dead of Winter knows it. The film hands her a role usually … 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
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
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
Glen Powell smiles, and you forgive him almost anything. That is the entire engine of How to Make a Killing, and it is also the reason critics and audiences walked out of this movie into two completely different rooms. The film opened in theaters back in February and barely registered. Twenty million dollars, a number … 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
House of the Dragon returns for Season 3 on June 21, and it has been a while since Season 2 left the board mid-game. If you do not want to rewatch eight episodes before the war finally turns bloody, here is everything you need to remember. Full spoilers for Season 2 follow. Where We Left … Read more
Colin is in his thirties. He lives with his parents outside London, works at a parking garage, and sings in a family barbershop quartet. That is the entire shape of his life when Pillion begins, and Harry Melling plays him with a stoop in his shoulders that tells you he has stopped expecting anything … Read more