Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone. Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything … Read more
On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions in a unanimous 5-0 ruling. On May 18, Netflix started filming a documentary about it. On May 30 — twelve days later — that documentary was streaming globally. That timeline is the story. Not just the Murdaugh story, though … Read more
Jennifer Lopez has made a lot of romantic comedies. Some of them were great. Some of them were not. Office Romance, which arrives on Netflix tomorrow, June 5, looks like it belongs in the first category — and the reason is standing next to her on every poster. Brett Goldstein, best known as Roy … Read more
There is a specific pleasure that Korean romantic comedies do better than almost anyone else: the slow, reluctant fall. Two people who should despise each other, trapped in circumstances that keep forcing them together, discovering — against their better judgment and everyone’s best interests — that they cannot stop thinking about the other person. My … Read more
There is a version of this story that gets made as a procedural. The 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common — a young mother stabbed to death in daylight while walking with her two-year-old son — has most of the ingredients that true crime productions reach for: a shocking crime, a botched … Read more
The Michael Jackson biopic that dominated box offices earlier this year made a choice that everyone noticed: it told the story of the music, the performances, the rise, and mostly stepped around the trial. That choice was a commercial calculation as much as a creative one, and it worked. But it left something unresolved, … Read more
The premise of Remarkably Bright Creatures sounds like a pitch that got through on charm: an elderly widow bonds with a giant Pacific octopus and a wayward young man. On paper, the octopus is the hook. On screen, you forget about the octopus for long stretches, and that turns out to be both the … Read more
he most disciplined thing The Four Seasons Season 2 does is refuse to let Nick haunt it. Steve Carell’s character was, in the first season, the kind of person a group of friends organizes itself around without quite realizing it — the one whose choices set the terms, whose appetites defined the social weather. … Read more
The teaser dropped today, and I’ve already watched it twice. Netflix released the first footage of Notes from the Last Row this morning, and it does exactly what a good teaser should do — it gives you just enough to understand what this show is going to be, and then it stops. What I … Read more
The first scene that stopped me in The Boroughs isn’t the supernatural one. It’s quieter than that. Sam Cooper has just moved into his new retirement community after the death of his wife, and he’s standing in his apartment looking at a box he hasn’t unpacked. He doesn’t open it. He just stands there. … Read more