Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In Blood Sacrifice, the Swedish thriller that reached number one on Netflix, someone is killing police officers. The deaths always come at 1:15 in the morning, always after a call to 112, the emergency line. For most of the five episodes it plays like a hunt for a faceless serial killer. It is not. … Read more
In 2019, Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live and fired four days later, before he taped a single episode, over old podcast clips that resurfaced the same week he got the job. That is usually where a comedy career stalls out, or at least detours into a long apology tour. Gillis skipped … Read more
Yes, The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is based on real events, and the woman in the title lived through them. Monica White is a real person. In late 2020 she matched with a man named Anthony Robinson on a dating app, dated him for a few months, and ended it in … Read more
Near the end of Don’t Say Good Luck, Sophie Birenbaum walks to the front of her school stage and sings “She Used to Be Mine.” She is sixteen, cast almost by accident in the lead of a student production of Waitress. In the musical, that song belongs to a grown woman looking back at … Read more
Joe Berlinger has spent years pointing a microphone at America’s most infamous killers and letting them talk. The Ted Bundy Tapes, The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, The Son of Sam Tapes. Each one hands you the voice of a man who did the killing with his own hands, and the … Read more
Something odd happened to Best Medicine on its way from Fox to Netflix. Earlier this year it aired on network television as a gentle medical show that runs, does fine, and slips out of the conversation by the next morning. Then Netflix added the complete first season on August 4, and it walked straight … Read more
Somewhere on day four of a 435-mile race through the jungle, an exhausted adventure racer tossed a meatball to a stray dog. That dog then followed his team for the rest of the course and eventually flew home with him to Sweden. So yes, Arthur the King is based on a true story, and … Read more
Our Sticky Love is the number two show in the world on Netflix right now, part of a steady run of Korean series climbing the global charts. It is the kind of title that ranking tends to reward: a warm, low-stakes romance you can sink into after a long day. A prosecutor, Go Eun-sae, … Read more
When the trailer dropped back in June, all we really had was a family sealed inside their own home and a title that sounded like a warning. Now the film is here, it’s the number one movie on Netflix worldwide, and the question everyone is searching is the same one the trailer left hanging: … Read more
Liam Neeson has spent the last decade playing more or less the same man: a soft-spoken widower with a particular set of skills, dropped into an airport, a train, a snowplow, some interchangeable American city. The movies blur together, almost on purpose. In the Land of Saints and Sinners is the one that doesn’t … Read more