Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
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
If you just finished My Life with the Walter Boys Season 3 and reached for your phone to find out whether Jackie and Cole are finally, officially together, here’s the short answer: they’re not. Not yet, and maybe not for a while. Cole ends things before the finale is over. Jackie, the Manhattan orphan who … Read more
Yellowstone ended, and every streaming service has spent the time since trying to build its own ranch to move into. Netflix’s version is Ransom Canyon, and its second season just rode in at number three on the platform worldwide. If you came to find out whether it is worth eight hours, the honest answer depends … Read more
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 arrived on Netflix this month carrying two numbers that do not belong together: 17 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 82 percent from audiences. That gap is not a rounding error. It tells you how this franchise works. The basics first, since people come looking for them. It … Read more
I didn’t expect to have much to say about a Kevin Hart bachelor-party comedy, and the early reviews suggested I wouldn’t. 72 Hours landed on Netflix on July 24 with a 16% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that usually files a movie under “content” and moves on. Then it went to number … Read more
In the summer of 2016, strangers started showing up at a condo in Anaheim, California, expecting sex. A Craigslist ad had invited them. A woman there, it said, wanted to act out a rape fantasy, and any resistance she put up was part of the game. The men were real. The ad was not. … Read more
On the night of 21 December 1988, a bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people were killed in the air and on the ground. What followed became the largest criminal investigation in British history. The Bombing of Pan Am 103, … Read more