Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
A small Lifetime movie is sitting at number two on Netflix right now, one slot behind a Kevin Hart comedy that cost many times its budget, and the reason has almost nothing to do with 2025. His, Hers & Ours works because of a bet Terry McMillan placed more than thirty years ago and … Read more
Jodie Foster has spoken French since she was a child. She spent twelve years at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and for decades she has dubbed her own performances into French for the release prints, so audiences there have been hearing her, in her own voice, all along. The one thing she had … Read more
Most true crime hurries toward the person who did it, angling for the interrogation room, the profile, the scene where a detective finally explains the mind behind the knife. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, the three-part Netflix series that landed on July 29, walks the other way, and that decision is the most interesting thing … Read more
Ordinary Angels opened quietly in early 2024, to modest business and politely mixed reviews, and then slipped off to streaming the way small faith-based dramas usually do. Two years later it sits in the Netflix top three, and plenty of people are meeting it for the first time. The strange part is that the … Read more
If you are here for the short answer, the biological father is Emilio Martinez, played by Erik Hayser, a man from a relationship Maca kept buried for twenty years. My Daughter’s Father, the Mexican drama that arrived on Netflix on July 22 under its original title El otro padre, does not hide this for long. … Read more
In the early hours of December 21, 2024, the palace burned down. A fire swept through a production facility in Yeoncheon County, South Korea, taking the main set buildings and a warehouse of lighting equipment with it. The set was empty and nobody was hurt. What burned was the home of The East Palace, … Read more
Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap … Read more
Lonnie Hawkins lives in a tour bus. He was the number one golfer in the world in 2004, and then he stood over the kind of putt he had been making his whole life and did not make it, and the twenty-two years since have been a long argument with that afternoon. When we … Read more
Matías takes a job coaching at a swimming club, and his employer offers him a second one on the side. Fernando will pay him to sleep with Fernando’s wife and send back video of it. Matías takes that job too. Desire, the Mexican thriller that landed on Netflix on July 17 and went straight … Read more
When Amy Robertson buries her father, she expects to inherit a charity and a family name worth being proud of. Instead she inherits a key to a storage locker she never knew he rented, and inside it, wrapped and hidden, is the decomposing body of a woman. The Body in the Locker, a 2025 … Read more