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
Facing El Chapo opens with a title that promises a cartel legend, then spends most of its ninety-one minutes somewhere much smaller: a roadside motel, two tired federal cops, and the most wanted man in the hemisphere sitting on a bed, waiting for backup that might not come. So the question most viewers bring … Read more
There is a line from the novel this movie is built on that readers tend to remember. If you leave a door half-open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken. The Whisper Man, arriving on Netflix on August 28, takes its name from a killer who lured children by standing outside their windows at night … Read more
On the third day of giving sworn testimony against Boeing, John Barnett was found dead in his parked truck in Charleston. He had left a note that ended, “I hope Boeing pays.” Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, now on Netflix and already one of the platform’s most watched films, builds itself around that morning. … Read more
Yes. A Child of My Own, currently the fourth most watched film on Netflix in the United States, is built on a real case, and the true story is colder than the soft one the movie opens with. For its first stretch, the film plays like a warm melodrama about a woman aching to … 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